Agents

The development of Cyber-Physical Systems poses multifaceted challenges for developers of very different areas of expertise including software, hardware tasks as well as communication and coordination aspects. This article focuses on autonomous behavior control and explains which challenges exist in that area and how they can be addressed. Due to the intrinsic complexity of architectures for behavior control, a variety of generic blueprints and frameworks have been devised which have been summarized in this article. Furthermore, two especially successful and interesting representatives, SOAR and BDI, will be discussed in more detail.

Today sensors and actuators gain increased importance in industrial production processes. Traditionally centralized processing architectures are used for sensor data processing and actuator control. Increasing sensor and actuator densities require new decentralized and distributed processing methods and architectures. Artificial Intelligence, part of computer science, can contribute to robustness and autonomy aspects concerning data processing and distribution.