Autonomous distributed system and its realization by multi agent nets

Abstract

Autonomous Distributed Systems (ADS) concept plays a central role for designing, operating, and maintaining complex systems in these ubiquitously networked society. Design objectives such as optimality, reliability, and efficiency are renovated according to this system paradigm. Petri nets and its related models provide one of the most concrete basis for realizing ADS to cope with their nondeterministic, concurrent, and asynchronous behavioral features. On the other hand, autonomous decisions by distributed units based on their own interests should be coordinated with total system objectives. Multi Agent Nets are Object-Oriented Colored Petri Nets for implementing autonomous intelligent units and collaborating actions among distributed units. Here in this paper, the realization of ADS by Multi Agent Nets are described through several industrial applications and prototyping that shows paramount versatility of the approach to hardware-software distributed systems encountered in wide variety of engineering problems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.