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M. Vallee, M. Merdan, W. Lepuschitz, G. Koppensteiner:
"Decentralized Reconfiguration of a Flexible Transportation System";
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 7 (2011), 3; 505 - 516.

This paper presents a decentralized approach for the
local reconfiguration of control software, which is based on a multiagent
system with ontology-driven reasoning. We apply this approach
to a transportation system and demonstrate improvements
on efficiency, fault tolerance and stability with several experiments.
One key element to achieve these results is the use of ontologies to
ensure the consistency of local reconfiguration of the control software
with the desired global behavior of the system. To show the
feasibility of our approach in a realistic industrial setting, we implemented
the multiagent system on the "Testbed for Distributed
Holonic Control" at the Automation and Control Institute.We also
used simulation to analyze its impact on the system performance.
The simulation results as well as the real system experiments indicate
that our approach is able to cope with the dynamic nature
of the transportation domain thereby enhancing reconfigurability,
robustness, and fault tolerance.

Automation agent, flexible transportation, ontology, reconfiguration, world model