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product agents about exchanging parts.
In all these enhancements special attention should be
paid to security and the protection of privacy of the
end-users of product agent enhanced systems. An im-
portant aspect is the fact that the agent should store its
information at a safe place in case the robot hardware
will fail. In our case this is the remote system where
the agent has the possibility to store important data.
8 CONCLUSIONS
Product agents can play an important role in every
part of the life cycle of a product. An important prop-
erty of these agents is that they should have no direct
impact on the product or system they are living in.
However useful information should be collected and
in case of disaster, these agents should keep a log of
the events leading to the disaster.
Product agents can be a virtual digital equivalent
of a product and this concept will be an enabling tech-
nology in implementing the internet of things.
The concept presented here is a natural evolu-
tion of the concept of using agents during produc-
tion. However in case of products made by production
technology not based on agent technology, a product
agent can be added afterwards, as described in our
case study. The information that could have been
collected during design and production is added af-
terwards and will play a role in the recycle phase or
maintenance during use phase.
The ROS platform proved to a very good plat-
form to implement the product agent. This is because
of the fact that the data-communication infrastructure
between nodes is already implemented in a way that
helps a lot in both the design and the implementation
of the product agent.
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