Comparison of Erlang/OTP and JADE implementations for standby redundancy in a holonic controller

This paper presents a comparison between two standby redundancy implementations within the context of a holonic controller for a manufacturing cell: using the Erlang/OTP programming framework and the JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment framework) multi-agent system (MAS) framework. Erlang (and its associated library OTP) contains several features that greatly simplify the implementation of standby redundancy. JADE is a popular MAS framework that has become the prevailing solution within academic research in holonic control. Both solutions implement standby redundancy using standard features of their respective frameworks. A case study comparison is performed using both quantitative and qualitative measures. The comparison shows that, for the case study, the Erlang/OTP implementation performs better than the JADE implementation for all the standby-redundant metrics: it achieves shorter changeover times, lower computational requirements overall, less computational and state synchronisation overhead, and greater fault handling flexibility. However, Erlang/OTP lacks the level of supporting communication and protocol infrastructure that is available in JADE due to JADE's strong heritage within multi-agent systems.