A Survey of the Use of Software Agents in Digital Factories

Digital factories represent an abstraction of real factories, which is useful to manage at a high level the processes as well as the interactions inside the factories but also the interactions between factories. This abstraction can automatize several processes and can enable to dynamically adapt the factory production to unexpected situations. Software agents can meet the requirements of digital factories by means of their features of autonomy, reactivity, proactivity and sociality. In this paper, we survey the use of software agents in the context of digital factories, showing how they can be exploited. A discussion about the advantages brought by software agents and the limitation of agent-based approaches completes the paper.