A Java software agent framework for hard real-time manufacturing control

Multiagent systems (MAS) have widely been recognized as a suitable software engineering approach to design distributed, flexible, and robust control-systems, as are needed to cope with current and future challenges in manufacturing. Yet, applying MAS for real-time control has been subject to several concessions so far. This paper presents a real-time Java multiagent platform, which allows both agent execution and distributed interaction under hard real-time conditions. The paper covers the architecture and implementation of such a platform, the integration of a domain knowledge model into the communication flow, and finally an analytical response time model including interactions, to actually proove the real-time capability of a distributed MAS.