Intelligent Agents and Semantic Technologies for Industry 4.0: Showcases and Challenges

摘要

About a decade ago, the fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, has been ushered by the introduction of the Internet of Things and Services into the manufacturing environment. Industry 4.0 is focused on creating smart products and processes flexibly in dynamic, real-time optimised and self-organising value chains, and profitably even down to production lot size of one. To rise up to this challenge, Industry 4.0 applications basically operate on the principles and use of autonomous cyber-physical systems with self-* properties for integrated production across the entire value chain. In particular, the IP-networked and sensor-equipped machinery, systems, vehicles and devices of smart factories are vertically and horizontally integrated with service-based business processes both within a company and inter-company value networks. Besides, cyber-physical production systems are envisioned to not only cooperate with each other but also with humans on a new level of sociotechnical interaction. From a holistic perspective, Industry 4.0 connects smart production closely with the areas of smart transport and logistics, smart buildings, and smart energy, while keeping humans in the loop via smart multimodal assistance in modern working environments. In this context, agent-based and semantic computing both with deep roots in AI are considered as keys to implement intelligent cyber-physical systems for Industry 4.0 scenarios in the future Internet. In this talk, I will present selected showcases of leveraging intelligent agents and semantic technologies for different Industry 4.0 applications, and discuss related research and societal challenges.