News

The FlowPro Transaction Network Connector has been released on GitHub. It has been developed in our publicly funded research project FlowPro and serves as the basis for interaction within a self-organizing multi-agent based micrologistics system.

The Transaction Network Connector uses Coaty and Raft over Coaty as base communication and consensus technologies. It runs across platforms and is deployed as a set of platform-specific binaries, a Docker image, and a Node.js package.

We are excited to announce the first open source release of a Raft Consensus Algorithm over Coaty implemented as a TypeScript/JavaScript library. Raft is a protocol with which a cluster of decentralized nodes can maintain a replicated state machine that is kept in sync through the use of a replicated log. The library uses the Coaty Framework for communication between nodes as well as for some aspects of persistency and cluster configuration.

The library is available as an npm package named @coaty/consensus.raft. Sources and documentation can be found on GitHub.

Coaty was used to build a decentralized decision network in one of the courses of the Ferienakademie 2022 in Sarntal Valley, South Tyrol, Italy hosted by the Technical University München, FAU Erlangen, and University of Stuttgart and supported by Siemens AG. Coaty enables self-organizing allocation of different resources in a smart city simulated by the Duckietown platform. For more information check this link.

The Siemens “Industrial IoT Evolution” video is online. The video illustrates the Collaborative IoT vision driving the developments of Coaty over the last years.

We will present our success story on why and how we went open source with Coaty at the Open Source @ Siemens Conference 2022. Our presentation “Coaty - Publish OSS to drive Industrial Research and Innovation Projects” will be on 18th May 09:00 - 09:45.

Together with our partner Flexus AG in the FlowPro project we published a blog article “FlowPro - Roadmap to self-organizing logistics” introducing the convergence of IT and OT technology for self-organizing logistics. The article (German only) is available here. Coaty is used in FlowPro as base communication technology to establish an AI empowered transaction network between the different heterogeneous logistic components.

Coaty is now also featured on the newly launched Open Source at Siemens website. It is one of the many Siemens contributions to the Open Source community loving to build great software.

Our article Resource Allocation in Decentralized, Self-organized, Multi-agent Industrial Systems Using Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient which outlines some of the results of our research on reinforcement learning in the context of Coaty empowered systems for self-organizing logistics has been presented on the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM).

Coaty has been successfully applied as core interaction framework in the real-world pilot of the pebbles project, which researched and demonstrated a platform for local energy trading (using a peer-to-peer model) integrating grid usefulness into the market mechanism in regional “energy-supply areas”.

The website https://www.flow-pro.de of our partner project FlowPro is online. Coaty will be an integral part for the interaction of the different components of a hetereogenous micrologistics system.

Coaty will be the core framework for the interaction of the agents inside the self-organizing multi-agent system for micrologistics in the FlowPro project. It will realize the loose coupling and decentralized architecture for the heterogeneous agents representing ground and air-bound vehicles, logistics and communication infrastructure. In addition, it will integrate the building blocks for AI, task bidding, security, and external services needed to make the envisioned FlowPro scenarios possible. FlowPro is a research project publicly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastucture.

BmVI Project Factsheet

A new binding package @coaty/binding.libp2p is available for Coaty JS. It provides a Coaty communication binding for transmitting Coaty communication events over libp2p, a brokerless peer-to-peer network stack. Note that this binding is considered experimental for now.

This package comes with complete API documentation and the reference specification of the Coaty libp2p communication protocol.

Siemens published a research story about bringing innovation to the automation of logistics applications with AGVs using Coaty.

A new binding package @coaty/binding.wamp is available for Coaty JS. It provides a Coaty communication binding for transmitting Coaty communication events via the WAMP publish-subscribe messaging protocol.

This package comes with complete API documentation and the reference specification of the Coaty WAMP communication protocol.

Coaty JS v2.1 introduces communication bindings, a mechanism to make Coaty’s underlying publish-subscribe messaging protocol interchangeable, while keeping the set of communication event patterns and your application code unaffected.

The default communication binding - MQTT with JSON-UTF8 payload encoding - is backward-compatible with Coaty 2 releases of Coaty JS and Coaty Swift. The communication binding API is considered experimental until Coaty 3.

The German heise Developer News Portal publishes a nice overview “Internet der Dinge: Coaty-Framework 2.0 gibt sich aufgeräumt”.

We are excited to announce a new major open source release of the Coaty framework, available in JavaScript/TypeScript and Swift.

Coaty 2 incorporates experience and feedback gathered with Coaty 1. It pursues the main goal to streamline and simplify the framework API, to get rid of unused and deprecated functionality, and to prepare for future extensions.

Among other changes, Coaty 2 features

• cleaned up Coaty object types,
• a simplified and more efficient distributed lifecycle management,
• redesigned Smart Routing by generalizing and broadening its scope,
• communication namespaces to restrict delivery of events,
• an optimized communication protocol.

Note that the essential set of communication event patterns didn’t change.

For the next minor release Coaty 2.1 we plan to introduce “communication bindings”, a mechanism to make Coaty’s underlying publish-subscribe messaging protocol interchangeable, while keeping the set of communication event patterns and your application code unaffected.

Coaty 2 applications are no longer backward-compatible and interoperable with Coaty 1 applications. The Coaty JS Migration Guide and the Coaty Swift Migration Guide describe (breaking) changes and how to upgrade your Coaty 1 applications to Coaty 2.

We have released a Coaty JS extension package that seamlessly connects decentralized Coaty applications with OPC UA servers. It provides specialized controllers to transform OPC UA data sources into Coaty Sensor Things, IO routing sources/actors, and raw MQTT messages, and to map Coaty remote operation calls to OPC UA method calls.

It comes with complete API documentation and an example project that demonstrates best practices and typical usage patterns.

We have integrated a ready-to-use template for a Coaty agent running in Node.js and programmed in TypeScript. Copy and use it as a blueprint for your own Coaty agent projects.

Today we are excited to announce Coaty Swift, a Swift version of the Coaty framework targeted at native iOS, iPadOS, and macOS applications. Coaty Swift comes with everything you need to build awesome collaborative apps, including:

• a tutorial and best practice example projects,
• a developer guide,
• framework API documentation.

We hope you love it. ❤️ Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Our special thanks go to Sandra and Johannes, who did a great contribution in developing Coaty Swift.

Last week we demonstrated a decentralized fleet management application in the InSystems Lab in Berlin. InSystems proANT transport robots coordinate the execution of transport tasks in a self-organizing fashion based on the Coaty Framework without a central coordination system.

Coaty JS release [1.6.0] integrates a new MQTT broker for development and testing. Due to concerns regarding performance and security vulnerabilities, the Mosca broker used previously has been replaced by Aedes, a lighweight barebone broker that installs fast. This broker comes bundled with the Coaty JS framework. When upgrading your Coaty JS applications, remove/uninstall mosca dependency from package.json.

Coaty JS release 1.5 introduces the Call-Return communication pattern. Unlike with classic RPC, this one-to-many, two-way pattern supports non-blocking remote operations to be executed by multiple Coaty agents. The calling agent can specify a context filter that defines conditions under which the operation is allowed to be performed.

Typical use cases of the Call-Return pattern include smart distribution of computational workloads to dedicated worker agents, and non safety critical, non latency sensitive decentralized command and control applications.

A new best-practice code example on remote operations can be found here.

The German heise Developer News Portal publishes an overview article “Coaty: Open-Source-Framework für Collaborative IoT”.

Coaty builds the communication foundation for one of the core use cases of CreST, modelling collaborative operation autonomy of autonomous guided vehicles. The Collaborative Embedded Systems project (CrESt) is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research under grant number 01IS16043.

We are excited to announce the first open source release of the Coaty framework, a cross-platform implementation targeted at JavaScript/TypeScript. It can be used to implement collaborative applications running as mobile or web apps in the browser or as Node.js services. Coaty JavaScript is available as an npm package named coaty. Sources and documentation can be found here.