In the period starting from the beginning of the project the work performed in the WP1was fully completed. The work was divided in three tasks. The first two dealt with requirements definition at two different levels. In the third task the MAS4AI system architecture was defined. The major goal of the work package WP2 is to develop a system that enables operation of multiple agents on different levels of factory’s hierarchy. The high-level ideas and the MAS4AI architecture described in the WP1 were developed using concrete technologies and software frameworks. The first two tasks, which were the main concern of the 1st project period, dealt with the system’s setup, agents’ modelling and configuration. There are three milestones in the WP2. The first milestone that dealt with modelling and setup of the MAS and was part of the 1st project period has successfully been achieved. There are two different sources of knowledge for the agent: (1) knowledge about a manufacturing application domain, which is available in the ontology. (2) Characteristics and properties individual agents, which is defined in the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). The main focus of the activities in the tasks of the WP3 in the reporting period was to define a MAS4AI ontology as well as AASs for the agents. As the result of the work in the WP3 eight draft AAS agent models and serialization by means of .aasx package files have been defined. A second outcome were a draft ontology as an RDF model serialized in a Turtle format (.ttl), several ontology APIs and instantiation in the Dydra cloud RDF store. The work packages WP4 and WP5 focused on the design and first prototypical implementation of the specific agents. As the result of the work in the WP4 and WP5 the prototypical agents for planning, optimisation and monitoring as well as coalition leader agents have been designed and developed, including standalone applications for planning and optimization meta-agents, deviation agent as well as a holonic coalition agent. They will be integrated into overall MAS4AI platform and extensively tested, validated and fine-tuned on the later stages of the project. A toolbox of the 8 optimization solutions, addressing different scheduling/ planning problems has also been implemented in the WP4 in the reporting period of the project. The major goal of the WP6 is to demonstrate and confirm the utility of MAS4AI framework in real industrial scenarios through demonstration activities. In the first project period the main activities were focused on the initial setup and implementation of the MAS4AI framework. In December 2021, the first runnable MAS4AI framework prototype of the SmartFactory-KL testbed environment was demonstrated in a form of a virtual workshop, where current results of integration and realization of the projects concepts were presented. In the first iteration we focussed on an integrated MAS4AI framework example with the resource agents for control and data acquisition of production and transport units. Furthermore, different possibilities of integration of the AI agents from the WP4 and the WP5 were accessed as well as the access to the Knowledge Base from the MAS4AI agents was discussed and tested.
All the KPIs set to track the progression towards the achievement of the projects objectives were achieved including the implementation of the core MAS4AI system, several implementations of agents and participation in standardization working groups.
