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), Prof Mike Wooldridge (University of Liverpool) 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: