Agent Programming for Industrial Applications: Some Advantages and Drawbacks

Autonomous agents are seen as a prominent technology to be applied in industrial scenarios. Classical automation solutions are struggling with challenges related to high dynamism, prompt actuation, heterogeneous entities, including humans, and decentralised decision-making. Besides promoting concepts, languages, and tools to face such challenges, agents must also provide high reliability. To assess how appropriate and mature are agents for industrial applications, we have investigated its application in two scenarios of the gas and oil industry. This paper presents the development of systems and the initial results highlighting the advantages and drawbacks of the agents approach when compared with the existing automation solutions.