Coordination of Self-Optimizing Mechatronic Systems - A New Application for Multi-Agent Planning

The paradigm of self-optimization introduces flexible and highly adaptive mechatronic systems. During the exploiation of this flexibility, new problems arise. One of these problems is the coordination of mechatronics systems and subsystems. This paper introduces the application area self-optimizing mechatronic systems and identifies the arising coordination problems. Two main scenarios are identified: coordination of autonomous mechatronic systems and coordination of several subsystems within an autonomous mechatronic system. We will show that multi-agent technology and in particular multi-agent planning can be applied to solve both coordination scenarios.

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