Industrial Agents explains how multi-agent systems improve collaborative networks to offer dynamic service changes, customization, improved quality and reliability, and flexible infrastructure. Learn how these platforms can offer distributed intelligent management and control functions with communication, cooperation and synchronization capabilities, and also provide for the behavior specifications of the smart components of the system. The book offers not only an introduction to industrial agents, but also clarifies and positions the vision, on-going efforts, example applications, assessment and roadmap applicable to multiple industries. This edited work is guided and co-authored by leaders of the IEEE Technical Committee on Industrial Agents who represent both academic and industry perspectives and share the latest research along with their hands-on experiences prototyping and deploying industrial agents in industrial scenarios. - Learn how new scientific approaches and technologies aggregate resources such next generation intelligent systems, manual workplaces and information and material flow system - Gain insight from experts presenting the latest academic and industry research on multi-agent systems - Explore multiple case studies and example applications showing industrial agents in a variety of scenarios - Understand implementations across the enterprise, from low-level control systems to autonomous and collaborative management units

The increasing complexity of manufacturing systems as well as the overall demands for flexible and fault-tolerant control of production processes stimulates (among many others) two key emerging technologies that are already making an important breakthrough in the field of intelligent manufacturing, control, and diagnostics. These two paradigms are: • the holonic approach based on the event-driven control strategy, usually aimed at modular control systems that are directly physically linked with the manufacturing hardware equipment, and • the multi-agent approach developed in the area of distributed information processing. The research communities working in both these fields are approaching the problem of intelligent manufacturing from different viewpoints and, until recently, to a certain extent, in an independent way. We can however observe quite a clear convergence of these fields in the last few years: the communities have started to cooperate, joining efforts to solve the painful problems involved in achieving effective industrial practice. We can see convergence in the terminology, standards and methods being applied.