Luis Domingos Ribeiro

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Linköping University

With the growing demand for sustainable and optimal packaging solutions, this study proposes a novel two-stage algorithm for the multi-container three-dimensional bin packing problem. The research addresses this problem within the context of a real-world industrial scenario and implements several practical constraints including: full shipment, cust...

Packing products into a pallet or other medium is an unavoidable activity for producing companies. In many cases, packing is based on operator experience and training using packing patterns that have worked before. Automated packing, on the other hand, requires a systematic procedure for devising packing solutions. In the scientific literature, thi...

Internet of Things, in particular, the concept of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), is one of the key technological pillars of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0. In this context, one of the areas of interest is safety, whereby multiple intelligent sensors may be permanently connected to a central system to autonomousl...

The 8th International Summer School on Industrial Agents: Autonomous Control in Logistics, Production and Energy Applications will be organized by the Helmut Schmidt University / University of the Federal Armed Forces, Institute for Automation Technology in Hamburg. The summer school will take place from 11th to 15th July 2022. It brings together l...

The eight papers in this special section focus on the topic of industrial software agents. These papers cover some of the key aspects in the area of software agents and their industrial applicability, which covers technologies, design, development, deployment, maintenance, and experimentation with agent-based systems.

The description of structure and complex interactions in Multi-agent-based Industrial Cyber-physical (MAS-ICPS) systems has been elusively addressed in the literature. Existing works, grounded on model-based engineering, have been successful at characterizing and solving system integration problems. However, they fail to describe accurately the col...

Agent-technologies have been used for higher-level decision making in addition to carrying out lower-level automation and control functions in industrial systems. Recent research has identified a number of architectural patterns for the use of agents in industrial automation systems but these practices vary in several ways, including how closely ag...

The integration of industrial automation systems and software agents has been practiced for many years. However, such an integration is usually done by experts and there is no consistent way to assess these practices and to optimally select one for a specific system. Standards such as the ISO/IEC 25023 propose measures that could be used to obtain...

Emerging industrial digitization metaphors such as Cyber-physical Systems and Digital Twins increasingly advocate the use of distributed and autonomous modular solutions. This paper proposes a visual notation for modelling the timing properties of such modular industrial systems. The proposed work builds upon an existing notation that enables the a...

t is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the 7th International Summer School on Industrial Agents: Embedded Intelligence within the Edge and Fog Computing, organized by UNINOVA - Center of Technology and Systems (CTS), which will take place online, on 21-25th of June 2021. The Summer School is technically co-sponsored by RICS - Robotics an...

The Industrial Revolution, which originally involved the change from an agrarian and handicraft economy to a market dominated by factory mechanization during the early 18th century, has profoundly shaped the world. It has progressed through four disruptive phases: Industry 1.0 through Industry 4.0. Industry 1.0 encompassed early automation, while I...

Industrial agents (IAs) [1] are multiagent-based systems (MASs) [2] that, for many years, have been advocated as a promising and realistic solution for an emerging set of industrial challenges. In the past, MASs fell into the scope of enterprise agility [3]-[8], and now, more than ever, pertain to the industrial digital transformation and sustainab...

Biological collective systems have been an important source of inspiration for the design of production systems, due to their intrinsic characteristics. In this sense, several high level engineering design principles have been distilled and proposed on a wide number of reference system architectures for production systems. However, the application...

Establishing mass-customization practices, in a sustainable way, at a time of increased market uncertainty, is a pressing challenge for modern producing companies and one that traditional automation solutions cannot cope with. Industry 4.0 seeks to mitigate current practice’s limitations. It promotes a vision of a fully interconnected ecosystem of...

The concept of Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, has the potential for radically increased system reconfigurability and flexibility. At its core, the notion of cyber-physical system, as the new generation of embedded systems with advanced artificial intelligence and improved communication capabilities, is seen as the key enabling c...

The papers in this special section focus on the deployment of smart agents and cyber-physical systems (CPS) for usse in future industrial systems and applications.

The harmonization of software (cyber part) and hardware (physical part) in a cyber-physical system or component is an important challenge. One of the theoretical advantages of the cyber-physical formulation is the increased system operability. This results from a harmonized cyber interface that governs the interactions of different systems and comp...

Purpose This paper aims to provide a method and decision support tool to enhance swift reconfiguration of Plug&Produce (P&P) systems in the presence of continuously changing production orders. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews different production scenarios and system design and configuration methods and more particularly specifies t...

As web related technologies continue to find their way into production related activities, their true potential can only be explored with a shop floor that is cyber-physically agile. This means the ability to quickly reconfigure a production system during production changeovers while significantly reducing setup times and non value-adding activitie...

Future industrial systems can be realized using the cyber–physical systems (CPSs) that advocate the coexistence of cyber and physical counterparts in a network structure to perform the system’s functions in a collaborative manner. Multiagent systems share common ground with CPSs and can empower them with a multitude of capabilities in their efforts...

The design, deployment, and implementation of industrial agent systems have been influenced both by technology and an emerging set of bio-inspired production paradigms. One of the main challenges encompassing these three stages is the fact that the conceptual simplicity of the main architectural constructs is not echoed by the corresponding impleme...

Recent roadmaps, ranging from ManuFuture to Industrie 4.0, all stress that true industrial sustainability will require far higher levels of a system's autonomy and adaptability. The ability to plug and produce modular equipment is a central research topic in this context. The design and implementation of such a system is not a trivial task and diff...

Nowadays manufacturing production systems are becoming more and more responsive in order to succeed in a highly unstable environment. The capability of a production system to effectively and efficiently adapt and evolve to face the changing requirements – imposed by volatile and dynamic global markets – is a necessary condition to enable manufactur...

Scheduling is a fundamental activity in modern shop floors. It is also known to be a highly complex problem which has motivated several sub-formulations and the subsequent models. Traditional approaches, typically enumerative or heuristic, struggle to contain the computation complexity and often present solutions for restricted cases that feature u...

This article describes the first version of a tool designed to infer the network characteristics of JADE-based multiagent systems. The rationale behind the tool is that systems in general and multiagent system in particular, often have some hidden dynamics that contribute to the emergence of desired and undesired characteristics. Traditional sniffi...

The new market trends are very different, so it is crucial to the companies improve the tools and capabilities that allow themselves readjust rapidly and effectively to the news market changes and to the new requirements. In order to facilitate this process, it is proposed in this paper an agent based implementation that can provide to the existent...

Computational and communication capabilities are increasingly being used in all devices. In the production context this leads to the generation of massive amounts of data that are rarely proficuously used. More particularly the application of data-mining techniques to infer knowledge from systems' operation to improve its design decisions remains f...

Sustainability is currently one of the biggest challenges and drivers of manufacturing industry. With traditional automation approaches becoming evermore inadequate to support sustainable mass customized production, the research focus is moving towards agile systems that enact companies with the ability to quickly reconfigure their shop-floors by s...

The new market trends are very different, so it iscrucial to the companies improve the tools and capabilities thatallow themselves readjust rapidly and effectively to the newsmarket changes and to the new requirements. In order tofacilitate this process, it is proposed in this paper an agent basedimplementation that can provide to the existent syst...

Simulation has played an important role along the years to predict systems' behaviour before their deployment. In the case of self-organising mechatronic systems simulation tools can help researchers and practitioners understanding the full potential of the solution as well as its underlying limitations. Self-organising mechatronic systems have pas...

The increasing market fluctuations and customized products demand have dramatically changed the focus of industry towards organizational sustainability and supply chain agility. Such critical changes inevitably have a direct impact on the shop-floor operational requirements. In this sense, a number of innovative production paradigms emerged, providin...

The research and development of self-organising mechatronic systems has been a hot topic in the past 10 years which conducted to very promising results in the close past. The proof of concept attained in IDEAS project [1] that plug&produce can be achieved in these systems opens up new research horizons on the topics of system design, configuration...

Emerging market conditions press current shop floors hard. Mass customization implies that manufacturing system have to be extremely dynamic when handling variety and batch size. Hence, the ability to quickly reconfigure the system is paramount. This involves both the stations that carry out the production processes and the transport system. Tradit...

In recent years, the fields of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, holonic manufacturing systems, and multiagent systems have made technological advances to support the ready reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems. While these technological advances have demonstrated robust operation and been qualitatively successful in achieving reco...

The research and development of self-organising mechatronic systems has been a hot topic in the past 10 years which conducted to very promising results in the close past. The proof of concept attained in IDEAS project [1] that plug&produce can be achieved in these systems opens up new research horizons on the topics of system design, configuration...

The emergence of modern manufacturing paradigms together with the growing interest on distributed architectures has been increasing the use of biologically inspired solutions. However, somehow along the way, developed approaches have converged towards more traditional systems where the physical and logical decoupled nature of the system has been pa...

JADE is a multiagent-based framework widely used for prototyping agent-oriented mechatronic architectures. JADE's messaging performance is normally rated unsuitable for real time operation in a mechatronic context and there are a few papers in the literature backing up this claim. The author's share this view however the main purpose of this paper...

With the emergence of new modern manufacturing paradigms new concepts, originally from the complexity sciences started to be introduced in the manufacturing systems, rendering traditional control approaches insufficient. Therefore, new approaches were developed, supported by the modern manufacturing paradigms bio-inspired background. However, someho...

There is a substantial difference between traditional industrial systems and systems resultant from emerging production paradigms in terms of both conceptualization and implementation. Backwards compatibility is fundamental in assessing the potential transitional period whereby legacy technology will operate under the conceptual framework of...

This paper details the FP7 IDEAS project multiagent mechatronic architecture. In particular the technical details that support plug and produce of individual modules or stations are discussed. To highlight the generic approach of the core agent-based mechatronic platform an example where a virtual station is introduced and seamlessly interacts with...

Multiagent system’s applications in industry have been widely investigated to support emerging production paradigms and models. One of the key concepts of these approaches is the utilization of a highly dynamic environment whereby intelligent agents are able to take autonomous decisions and self-organize to circumvent production disturbances. Deplo...

This paper discusses the main problematic, misunderstandings and gaps associated with the development of self-organizing multiagent mechatronic systems. The paper reflects the authors' experience in designing and implementing Multiagent Mechatronic Systems. It also partly addresses the work developed under the FP7 IDEAS project (rated an EU FP7 suc...

There has been an increasing interest from industry in distributed architectures since they promote a plug-and-produce and robust environment, where adaptability and fault tolerance are native. Much research has been conducted in this field mainly supported by multi-agent and service oriented technologies. Nevertheless the retrieval and visualizati...

In recent years a set of production paradigms has emerged to circumvent pressing production challenges. In particular the ability of composing lower order components to form higher order entities with more complex functionalities and reuse them to build yet more complex system has been widely explored. However material handling aspects have been ta...

With the systematic implantation and acceptance of IT in the shop-floor a wide range of production paradigms, relying in open interoperable architectures, have been developed. Exploring these technological novelties, they promise to revolutionize the way current plant floors operate and react to emerging opportunities and disturbances. There is a h...

A cornerstone of modern production paradigms is the encapsulation of heterogeneity and system complexity. This functional encapsulation is supported by distinct architectural building blocks that once instantiated abstract, manage and control a specific system. Modern production approaches rely in semi hierarchical architectures to organize the int...

While the application of IT in automation gains traction, mostly motivated by the introduction of Service Orientated Approaches and Multiagent modelling, it is sometimes unclear to practitioners what is the full potential and boundaries of such concepts and technologies. The FP7 IDEAS project is focused in the design and development of Multiagent s...

With the advent of the Internet and the progressive development and consolidation of a wide range of web standards and technologies as well as the advances in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), namely the multi agent system concept, new opportunities have emerged for conceiving, modelling and enhancing shop floor's performance and response....

The NEMO&CODED (NEMO) project targets the development of a standard-based software infrastructure, aiming to provide the appropriate support to manage energy-related devices considering an environment where energy is generated, stored, distributed, and consumed in a rational and environmentally correct way. This paper presents and discusses the res...

The application of Multiagent Systems for Intelligent Automation has now been carried out consistently for at least one decade. It is a fundamentally new approach whereby a system can be built in a fully open, interoperable and standardized way. Not only the decoupled and open nature of these system supports the establishment of a new business logi...

The present article describes the development of a standard-based software infrastructure, supported by the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, for the management of complex distributed energy systems where efficient energy production, distribution and consumption are considered. The work has been developed on the context of the NEMO&CODED proj...

The contribution of IT in reshaping the industrial automation contexts is undeniable. If years of investment in research have not been in vain, the next generation of automation devices shall be IT enabled. This research has been carried out in multidisciplinary teams fusing the Academia and Industry and has developed along two main lines: theoreti...

Modern control approaches are either designated as complex or tackle complex systems. The concept of Evolvable Production System (EPS) entails an iterative system design/control loop that supports system Adaptation and Evolution. Both concepts are borrowed from natural systems and, if properly instantiated and explored for the sake of production sy...

Recent shop floor paradigms and approaches increasingly advocate the use of distributed systems and architectures. Plug-ability, Fault Tolerance, Robustness and Preparedness are characteristics believed to emerge by instantiation of these fundamentally new design approaches. However these features, when effectively present, often come at the cost o...

Modern Production Paradigms, supported by state-of-art developments in IT, present major opportunities for the effective implementation of sustainable shop floors. With an increased focus in seamless system reconfiguration most proposals advocate the use of modular and distributed architectures that are dynamic compositions (adaptable and evolvable...

The present work addresses the problem of shop-floor agility, presenting it as the fundamental cornerstone for true agility and responsiveness of an enterprise willing to participate in highly dynamic collaborative organizations and supply chains. Clearly, as the economic climate toughens, the exploration of the increasingly volatile business oppor...

Natural systems often exhibit, at a macro level, a tendency to order that emerges from simple and local interactions between the system components. This idea that the whole can denote a consistent behavior that is more than the sum of individual components has inspired the design and development of many artificial systems. Recently, with the pervas...

The emerging production paradigms, potentiated by the advances in Information Technologies (IT), especially in web related standards and technologies as well as the progressive acceptance of the multiagent systems (MAS) concept and related technologies, envision collections of modules whose individual and collective function adapts and evolves ensu...

A wide range of paradigms have been proposed that, taking advantage of the emerging IT technologies, increasingly support autonomous and evolvable shop-floors which are able to react to disturbances and opportunities. Among the emerging paradigmatic proposals the concept of Evolvable Production System (EPS) is emerging as it proposes a holistic app...

With the systematic implantation and acceptance of IT in the shop-floor a wide range of Production Paradigms have emerged that exploring these technological novelties promise to revolutionize the way current plant floor operate and react to emerging opportunities and disturbances. With the increase of distributed and autonomous components that inte...

An Evolvable Production System (EPS) is a complex and lively entity composed of intelligent modules that interact, through bio-inspired mechanisms, to ensure high system availability and seamless reconfiguration. The diagnosis of such dynamic systems, characterized by constant change, presents new diagnostic challenges and opportunities that can ha...

Doctoral programs in science and engineering are important sources of innovative ideas and techniques that might lead to new products and technological innovation. Certainly most PhD students are not experienced researchers and are in the process of learning how to do research. Nevertheless, a number of empiric studies also show that a high number...

Emergent architectures and paradigms targeting reconfigurable manufacturing systems increasingly rely on intelligent models to maximize the robustness and responsiveness of modern installations. Although intelligent behaviour significantly minimizes the occurrence of faults and breakdowns it does not exclude them nor can prevent equipment's normal...

Mixed-model assembly lines typically rely in intermediate stock buffers to handle disturbances and optimize the car sequence between the main workshops in the plant. The optimization of these buffers is often constrained by installation and production specific rules. In this paper an algorithm for the stock management of buffers with drawers is pro...

The globalized nature of current business environments led to the emergence of new networked enterprise organizational paradigms (supply chains, extended enterprises, virtual enterprises, collaborative networks, etc.) to meet changing requirements and tackle profitable but volatile opportunities overall agility is required.Eventually the shop floor...

Emergent architectures and paradigms targeting reconfigurable manufacturing systems increasingly rely in intelligent models to maximize the robustness and responsiveness of modern installations. Although intelligent behaviour significantly minimizes the occurrence of faults and breakdowns it does not exclude them nor can prevent equipment’s normal...

Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) is a fundamentally new paradigm to design, maintain and evolve industrial systems. It is a holistic approach supporting product/shop floor co-evolution and ensuring a tailored and balanced solution for sustainable enterprise development. Its core is engineered by distributed intelligence materialized in proactive...

Modularity and embedded intelligence enable seamless shop floor reconfiguration enhancing reactiveness and responsiveness to changing requirements. However the amount of information underlying modern enterprises is considerable. Recent approaches attempt to map and relate the main concepts in domain ontologies. Often that information is excessive a...

Holonic Assembly systems require intelligent and distributed IT support. Traditionally this has been achieved through the use of multiagent systems (MAS). Recently a significant research effort has been invested in applying Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) in automation domains. MAS and SOA are often perceived has competing concepts and technol...

To withstand future socio-economic challenges new approaches to industrial control have emerged. These methodologies require however the underlying systems to be fully integrated from an information technology point of view. Not all existing distributed technologies have proven successful in managing interoperability constraints. The research in se...

Nowadays Internet enabled technologies have open wide the door for penetrating new markets and profiting from specific business scenarios. In the manufacturing domain these opportunities are of volatile nature and rather than requiring large scale production of a single item demand mid/low volume production with variants of a certain good. The impa...

This document surveys existing research in emergent concepts and technologies supporting the establishment of what are expected to be future automation systems. Multiagent systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are currently the most promising concepts in this matter. The author's experience in the implementation and study of SOA an...

Emergent architectures and paradigms targeting reconfigurable manufacturing systems increasingly rely on intelligent modules to maximize the robustness and responsiveness of modern installations. Although intelligent behaviour significantly minimizes the occurrence of faults and breakdowns it does not exclude them nor can prevent equipment’s normal...

Besides coping with the highly dynamic product and production system life cycles with ever-changing requirements, modern assembly systems also need to be user-friendly. Their modularity at fine granularity-level combined with local intelligence and a distributed control approach allows the systems to evolve together with the requirements -but their...

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emergent approach to industrial control that accompanies new industrial paradigms in the response to the continuously changing socio-economic challenges posed to modern and future enterprises. Maximizing the profit under adverse market conditions is also a matter of cost cut and the use of distributed and i...

Evolvable production systems (EPS) lies at the leading edge of the new paradigms currently emerging as a response to the continuously changing socio-economic challenges that modern enterprises have to deal with. Maximizing the profit under adverse market conditions is also a matter of cost cut and EPS targets this through an efficient diagnosis mec...

The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterprise’s interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents n...

The use of pervasive networked devices is nowadays a reality in the service sector. It impacts almost all aspects of our daily lives, although most times we are not aware of its influence. This is a fundamental characteristic of the concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). Ambient Intelligence aims to change the form of human-computer interaction, fo...