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Author: Thomas Wagner
Institute of Industrial Automation and Software Engineering
University of Stuttgart
Pfaffenwaldring 47, D-70550 Stuttgart - Germany
Abstract.
Designing, operating and maintaining industrial plants require extensive and complex engineering processes. An integrated engineering process considering all different aspects, data and workflow of plant automation design as well as interoperability to other systems is the key to more efficiency and lower costs of engineering tasks in the plant life cycle. There exists no comprehensive and satisfying solution to this problem today. However, an agentoriented view can lead to fundamentally new and promising approaches to an integrated plant engineering process. The goal of this paper is to clearly identify the specific goals and challenges in engineering industrial plants and to show that agents are a beneficial approach to meet them. To this end, an agentoriented solution for integrated engineering of Automation Systems is presented, applying the advantages of agent concepts while considering the constraints of existing automation structures. 1 Introduction Engineering of Industrial Automation Systems is an extensive and complex process that differs strongly from systems engineering in other application domains. This results from the fact that automation systems in industrial plants (like pharmaceutical, production or Power plants) are complex, large and persistent hardware / software systems being stamped by the characteristics of the technical processes they are designed to control. Hardware and software within these systems are strongly interrelated and in designing a plant the mechanical, electrical, process and control software aspects have to be considered. The software in classical automation systems accomplishes the typical automation functions for control of the technical process [1]: control of sequences, signaling, handling, operating, monitoring and supervision. To implement this functionality, special languages with low abstraction level are applied (defined in IEC 61131-3). Examples are function building blocks and sequential function charts. However today the software in automation systems faces new challenges. Firstly, automation systems are subject to ongoing partial modifications: rapid development and decreasing costs of high-capacity hardware components cause changes in the plant’s hardware structure and functionality during its life cycle, which is up to 30 years. As existing plants cannot be rebuilt due to high investment volumes, the changes in hardware components affect particularly the software: it has to be modified continuously and its amount and complexity increases. Besides that plant operating managers increasingly require the possibility to use hardware and software components of different manufacturers and technologies in their plants [2]. Both trends result in increasing efforts for integration and configuration of the automation system. Hardware components of different manufacturers e.g. often require individual parameterization tools, resulting in a large set of tools for the engineer to handle [3]. Besides that, plant operating managers today want to manage and optimize the use and the maintenance of their assets during the operating of the plant. And finally, a strong need for the integration of functionality from enterprise management and business levels into the automation system arises (vertical integration) [2]. As automation systems have been evolved isolated from other enterprise software systems, every system has its own grown architecture and data structures and the efforts for establishing interoperability of the heterogeneous systems are high. These aspects are discussed in more detail in [4;5;6;7]. They all affect tasks and processes for the engineering of automation systems, leading to three main challenges:
1. Faster development and modification of automation systems in plants, e.g. engineer support in plant design (planning), implementation and commissioning.
2. Support in plant management and engineering during operation, e.g. condition monitoring, diagnosis, maintenance and asset management.
3. Integration and interoperability of different heterogeneous systems, e.g. enterprise resource planning systems, or parameterization tools for field devices. Today a lot of these engineering and integration tasks are done manually with high effort and costs. There is a strong need in the industry for extensive support of these tasks by additional engineering functionality of the automation system. However, the listed challenges result in strong requirements on flexibility and adaptability of the software during the whole life cycle [8]. And, for the automation of engineering and integration tasks also more autonomy in the software is needed. As explained in [6], existing automation system software concepts with static architectures and functionality are not capable to meet these requirements. The agent-oriented paradigm is a promising new approach for systems that are complex, distributed and changeable. It is a reasonable alternative to contemporary approaches in software engineering [9]. But not much work has been done yet to investigate how agent-oriented approaches could help on dealing with the imbalance of existing automation system structures compared to the new engineering challenges. This paper analyses the problem domain and presents a agent-oriented concept that brings a substantial new approach for the engineering and integration challenges within existing automation software. This paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 the classical way of engineering automation systems in plants together with its problems is introduced. In Section 3 modern component-based approaches are investigated. The agent-based engineering approach is presented in Section 4. It shows the use and the advantages of agent concepts for engineering automation systems. Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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