February 2021

After many efforts over about a 5-year period I am happy to report the publication of the IEEE Standard 2660.1-2020 titled “Recommended Practice for Industrial Agents.” You can find it here. We are moving fast into an IoT era where local decision making either in the form of optimization, control action or system assessment, becomes critical and widespread. The most typical software entity that performs some type of any activity at a local level and in the form of a module is the ‘agent.’ Agents have been the backbone of many approaches, paradigms and architectures in dozens of applications. However, there is little information or methodology of how an agent should be deployed for a certain purpose, how to interact with other agents or the equipment it drives and the data it collects. This standard introduces exactly that. An algorithm (in the abstract sense) that takes into account the premises of an application and ranks according to various metrics which type of programming, organizing and communication protocols would fit best the said application.

This standard represents a major step forward in opening up a wide and clearly specified path for agents to be deployed in applications of the buildings, industrial, power, energy and other sectors. Stakeholders in these fields can employ this standard to best define the value of every different agent implementation in light of each application scoped.

I have been fortunate to work with great collaborators and honored to serve as the subgroup chair for the Energy & Power systems applications.