An approach for leveraging Digital Twins in agent-based production systems

Abstract

To cope with individualization and the high costs of downtimes, modern production systems should be flexible, adaptable, and resilient. Multi-Agent Systems are suitable to address these requirements by decentralizing production systems. However, the agent paradigm is still not widely applied. One of the key reasons is that the agents' knowledge bases had to be created manually, which is cumbersome, error-prone, and insufficiently standardized. Digital Twins have the potential to solve this issue, as they describe relevant information in a standardized way. This paper presents an approach to leveraging Digital Twins, i. e., the Asset Administration Shell, to realize Multi-Agent Systems in the production context. For this, a parser automatically extracts relevant information from the Digital Twins and initializes the individual agents in a Multi-Agent System, i. e., PADE.