Home // ICAS 2015, The Eleventh International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems // View article
Authors:
Hosny Abbas
Mohammed Amin
Samir Shaheen
Keywords: agent-based applications; industrial control networks; real-time monitoring; supervisory control; agents cooperation.
Abstract:
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are adopted and tested with many complex and critical industrial applications, which are required to be adaptive, scalable, context-aware, and include real-time constraints. Industrial Control Networks (ICN) are examples of these applications. An ICN is considered a system that contains a variety of interconnected industrial equipments, such as physical control processes, control systems, computers, and communication networks. It is built to supervise and control industrial processes. This paper presents a development case study on building a multi-layered agent-based ICN in which agents cooperate to provide an effective supervision and control of a set of control processes, basically controlled by a set of legacy control systems with limited computing capabilities. The proposed ICN is designed to add an intelligent layer on top of legacy control systems to compensate their limited capabilities using a cost-effective agent-based approach, and also to provide global synchronization and safety plans. It is tested and evaluated within a simulation environment. The main conclusion of this research is that agents and MAS can provide an effective, flexible, and cost-effective solution to handle the emerged limitations of legacy control systems if they are properly integrated with these systems.
Pages: 77 to 85
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015
Publication date: May 24, 2015
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-3913
ISBN: 978-1-61208-405-3
Location: Rome, Italy
Dates: from May 24, 2015 to May 29, 2015