Intelligent agents supporting digital factories

Intelligent agents represent a widely exploited paradigm of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). They have been applied in many fields, and recently they have appeared also in the digital factory field. Digital factories are abstractions of real factories, which enable high-level management of factories' processes, along with their automatization. So, the real factories can dynamically adapt their processes to unexpected situations. In this paper, we survey different works at the state of the art that show how intelligent agents can support digital factories, along with the limitations of their application. A discussion about the advantages of intelligent agents and the open issues completes the paper.