Integrated supervision: a generic component-based architecture for intelligent control systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to the design of intelligent control systems based on the use of a combination of abstract patterns for architectural design, termed the integrated supervision pattern language (ISPL). As a result of applying the ISPL to the domain of complex dynamic process control, a new design of the integrated process supervision (IPS) scheme is described, based on the flexible assembly of SMARTS components or supervisory modules for autonomous robot task-oriented systems, that allow for the incremental construction of distributed, hierarchical hybrid systems. The proposed IPS architecture constitutes in effect a generic framework for the building of online supervision and control systems, that allows in particular for the effective integration of both traditional and AI-based control techniques, while providing a high degree of reusability as well as portability.