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Synthesizing Multi-agent System Organization from Engineering Descriptions

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Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14378))

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Abstract

Automation of electro-mechanical systems, such as the ones deployed in a building or a factory, is engineered based on the design-time knowledge of requirements, system configuration, physical processes, and control and coordination strategies. However, any change in these aspects during the system’s operation requires manually adapting the affected automation programs. Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer the potential to tackle dynamic changes in the system by letting the software agents autonomously reason about the means of achieving their goals at runtime while collaborating socially and being aware of the environment in which they operate. Nevertheless, designing a MAS-based solution for engineering applications is challenging because decomposing engineering system descriptions into MAS abstractions is a manual process and requires knowledge of the design and programming paradigm. This paper shows that the MAS organization dimension, which serves as the top-down specification of agent behavior, can be automatically decomposed from engineering system descriptions. The system descriptions, which are fragmented, are interlinked using an integration ontology developed for the purpose. Evaluation of the approach in a real-life deployment of a building automation system showed reduced engineering effort to deploy the MAS, and the resulting runtime was adaptive to changes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Can be accessed here: https://github.com/codepasta/autonomous-buildings.git.

  2. 2.

    System Description as a singular is used here to emphasise that it now appears as cohesive knowledge.

  3. 3.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Simon Mayer, Andrei Ciortea, and Danai Vachtsevanou, for the many discussions and inputs which has helped shape my approach to the problem. I also thank my employers Siemens AG, Smart Infrastructure Division, who have actively supported my research and provided the opportunity to conduct evaluations in real-life setups.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Siemens AG, Zürich, Switzerland

    Ganesh Ramanathan

  2. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Ganesh Ramanathan

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  1. Ganesh Ramanathan
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Correspondence to Ganesh Ramanathan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of St.Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Andrei Ciortea

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Mehdi Dastani

  3. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jieting Luo

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Ramanathan, G. (2023). Synthesizing Multi-agent System Organization from Engineering Descriptions. In: Ciortea, A., Dastani, M., Luo, J. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48539-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48539-8_11

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