Challenges of the "Global Understanding Environment" Based on Agent Mobility

Abstract

Among traditional users of Web resources, industry also has a growing set of smart industrial devices with embedded intelligence. Just as humans do, smart industrial devices need online services—for example, for condition monitoring, remote diagnostics, maintenance, and so on. In this chapter, we present one possible implementation framework for such Web services. Assume that such services should be Semantic-Web-enabled and form a service network based on internal and external agents’ platforms, which can host heterogeneous mobile agents and coordinate them to perform needed tasks. The concept of a “mobile-service component” assumes not only the exchange of queries and service responses but also the delivery and composition of a service provider itself. A mobile-service component carrier (agent) can move to a field device’s local environment (embedded agent platform) and perform its activities locally. Service components improve their performance through online learning and communication with other components. Heterogeneous service components’ discovery is based on semantic P2P search. In this chapter, we discuss the Global Understanding Environment as an enabling agent-driven semantic platform for implementation of the heterogeneous industrial resources, condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance. The main challenges of such an environment are presented, which are “semantic adapters” for industrial objects, diagnostic models, exchange and integration, distributed trust management, and the concept of a human as a Web service.