Modern manufacturing systems are expected to be flexible and efficient in order to cope with challenging market demands. Thus, they must be flexible enough as to meet changing requirements such as changes in production, energy efficiency, performance optimization, fault tolerance to process or controller faults, among others. Demanding requirements can be defined as a set of quality of service (QoS) requirements to be met. This paper proposes a generic and customizable multi-agent architecture that, making use of distributed agents, monitors QoS, triggering, if needed, a reconfiguration of the control system to recover QoS. As a proof of concept, the architecture has been implemented to provide availability of the control system understood as service continuity. The prototype has been tested in a case study consisting of an assembly cell where assessment of the approach has been conducted.

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Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCS) are used in most of the industrial sectors to achieve production improvement, process optimization and time and cost reduction. Integration, reuse, flexibility and optimization are demanded to adapt to a rapidly changing and competitive market. In fact, standardization is a key goal to achieve integration in this type of applications. The international standardization efforts have lead to the definition of the IEC 1131 standard. Part 3 of this standard defines a software model for defining automation projects as well as 5 programming languages, emphasizing software reuse. The Technical Committee 6 for XML belonging to the international organization PLCopen, has defined an XML based interface for importing/exporting automation projects. This work presents a graphical modeling tool that guides the user through the definition of the IEC1131-3 automation project, as a PLC programming tool does.

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