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IEEE IECON 2013 Special Session on: Industrial Agents
http://iecon2013.org/files/SS47.pdf
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This special session will cover the Industrial Agents aspects and is organized within IEEE IECON 2013. All papers will be published by IEEE within the IEEE IECON proceedings. Exceptional papers may be invited for an extended version as book chapters on an Industrial Agents book.


Technical Outline of the Session and Topics:

The prevalence of IT and cyber-physical systems in all aspects of life, is currently imposing very strong requirements, demanding personalized/customized products and solutions, that integrate intelligence and are able to handle tasks delegated by the owners. This implies for instance shorter delivery times and shorter life-cycles, forcing companies to adapt their processes by having flexible, reconfigurable production plants. This leads to the challenge of having systems that exhibit better re-configurability, robustness and responsiveness, and at the same time be energy-efficient. In parallel, increasing complexity of engineering processes of production systems and production system life cycles decrease raise the problem of advanced methodologies for system engineering and start-up.

The agent technology and in its background the agent orientation are a promising approaches to address this current challenge, introducing an alternative way to design management and control systems based on the decentralization of functions over distributed autonomous and cooperative entities. Some preliminary results show that agent technology is highly promising in realizing flexible, reconfigurable and robust industrial applications in a number of application domains such as manufacturing, energy / smart grid, oil & gas, automotive, logistics, smart cities etc. just to name a few. Nevertheless, there are still open issues related to the applicability of agent technology, its benefits and challenges.

This special session intends to contribute for stimulating the discussion of ideas, concepts, techniques, technologies and projects, based on the application of distributed paradigms, namely agent orientation and agent technology, in the development of modular, reconfigurable and robust industrial systems. Particular attention may be given to the industrial applications of such systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Intelligent and cooperative cyber-physical systems.
- System of systems and complex systems engineering.
- Concepts, visions and roadmaps for industrial agents.
- Agent in field control.
- Engineering methodologies, techniques and technologies and the changes caused by them within traditional engineering processes.
- Self-* properties in application domains e.g. factory automation, smart grid, etc.
- Standardization and best practices in industrial settings.
- Integration with emerging Internet (fixed & mobile) technologies.
- Lessons Learned from real-world use-cases.
- Infrastructures, Services and Testbeds for Industrial Agents.
- Impact of agent orientation on tooling.
- Economic and market analysis of Industrial Agents and their impact.

The deadlines named in the call may change (based on possible deadline extension). Please check the conference website for further details.

Additional information:
- IECON Conference: http://www.iecon2013.org
- A pdf version of this CFP: http://iecon2013.org/files/SS47.pdf