Design of High Availability Manufacturing Resource Agents Using JADE Framework and Cloud Replication

摘要

The paper proposes a methodology for replicating in the cloud software agents associated to the control of manufacturing resources. Replicating in Cloud Manufacturing Control architectures (CMfg) agents and their services results in a high availability (HA) decentralized control system. Agents' services and replicated data will be detailed in the paper. This methodology represents an extension of the generic agentification process which consists in associating a software agent to a physical entity in order to simplify the access to the resource's operations managed as services and easily accessed through standard messages in multi-agent control frameworks (MAS). The developed methodology is validated using the JADE framework. The paper explains how a JADE agent acts as intermediary between the MAS framework based on the exchange of standardized FTPA messages, and direct resource communication which is based on exchanging information over a TCP connection.