Distributed agents are more and more used in automation control systems, among others for monitoring, data collection, fault diagnosis and control. However, existing agent platforms do not always fulfill the requirements of practical automation applications in respect to real time properties and resource usage. Often, they offer a lot of functionality that is not necessary in automation and leads to significant overhead in respect of design effort and runtime resources. To meet the specific requirements of the automation domain, the resource-efficient agent platform AMES was developed, which relies on established concepts of agent platforms, but modifies and supplements them accordingly. The AMES platform is implemented in Java and in several C++ variants. This paper describes the architecture of the AMES platform and discusses several performance issues. Results of various performance tests are presented in comparison to the established agent platform JADE.
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