I received my PhD in 2003 from the University of Southampton for my thesis on
An Agent-Oriented Design Methodology for Production Control
My supervisors were Prof Nick Jennings (University of Southampton in 2003), Prof Mike Wooldridge (University of Liverpool in 2003) and Dr Kurt Sundermeyer (DaimlerChrysler AG).
Abstract: This thesis presents and evaluates the DACS methodology for designing agent-based production control systems. This methodology is appropriate and sufficiently prescriptive for a control engineer with only minimal training in agent concepts and with no prior experience in agent development to design an agent-based production control system. This was achieved by deriving the concepts of the methodology from an analysis of the application domain and by specifying all relevant agent-oriented design rules in terms of these concepts. In particular, the methodology consists of a method for analysing the decision making necessary to control a production system; a method for identifying appropriate production control agents; and a method for selecting interaction protocols to resolve any decision dependencies between the agents which allows to re-use existing interaction protocols.
My PhD was published by Springer: S. Bussmann, N.R. Jennings, M. Wooldridge, Multiagent Systems for Manufacturing Control, 2004, ISBN: 3-540-20924-7.
Preliminary results of this PhD were first published in the following papers: