MULTIAGENT-BASED CONTROL SYSTEMS: AN HYBRID APPROACH TO DISTRIBUTED PROCESS CONTROL

Abstract In this paper a general architecture and a platform developed to implement distributed applications, as a set of cooperating intelligent agents, is presented. Second, it will be shown how this architecture has been used to implement a distributed control system for a complex process: the economic control of a fossil power plant. Agents in this application encapsulate different distributed hardware/software entities: neural and fuzzy controllers, data acquisition system, presentation manager, etc. These agents are defined in ADL, a high level specification language, and interchange data/knowledge through service requests using a common knowledge representation language.