Agent-oriented programming of manufacturing control tasks

The success of agent-oriented concepts in various application domains, in particular in manufacturing control, creates the need for an agent-oriented analysis, design, and programming methodology. This paper presents a programming method that covers one step of the necessary methodology. Given a specification of the task to be performed, the method allows to program the corresponding agent in three steps: (i) programming of the individual tasks; (ii) synchronization of tasks to avoid concurrency problems; and (iii) specification of script execution on a single processor machine. The programming method was specifically designed for implementing manufacturing control agents and complies with the industrial requirements stated in this paper.