Most, if not all, large-scale manufacturers are juggling a plethora of systems in their digital backbones. Often, these will all be operating at once on the shop floor: a predictive maintenance agent watches vibration sensors for safety patterns, a vision-based quality control agent flags product defects and a scheduling agent juggles changeovers as an inventory agent keeps a tab on procurement. Each has a clear operative task, but more often than not, these systems are not talking to one…