The Applicability of ISO/IEC 25023 Measures to the Integration of Agents and Automation Systems

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the applicability of ISO/IEC 25023 measures for assessing the integration of software agents with industrial automation systems, highlighting relevant measures and challenges in their computation.

Contribution

It analyzes the suitability of ISO/IEC 25023 characteristics for evaluating agent and automation system integration, identifying relevant measures and limitations.

Findings

Most ISO/IEC 25023 measures are relevant for integration assessment.

Some technical measures are difficult to compute in practice.

Certain measures do not effectively guide integration practices.

Abstract

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 a quantification on the characteristics of such integration. In this work, the suitability of these characteristics and their proposed calculation for assessing the connection of industrial automation systems with software agents is discussed. Results show that although most of the measures are relevant for the integration of agents and industrial automation systems, some are not relevant in this context. Additionally, it was noticed that some measures, especially those of a more technical nature, were either very difficult to computed in the automation system integration, or did not provide sufficient guidance to identify a practice to be used.