Past, Present and Future of Distributed Intelligent Control in Industrial Applications

The intention of the talk is to give the overview of alternative control approaches that have been applied in industrial automation domain for more than two decades. Apart from more traditional centralized and hierarchical approaches the discussed ones are built on distributed, autonomous and intelligent entities that provide and consume services in networked environments. The key drivers have been holonic concept, multi-agent systems and recently service-oriented architectures. The talk discusses the major benefits as well as prevailing roadblocks hindering the widespread exploitation and deployment in real factories. It reviews the principle methodologies, architectures, tools and either pilot trials or commercially successful applications of industrial agent systems with major focus on achievements of Rockwell Automation company.