Designing a reusable co-ordination modulefor co-operativeindustrial control applications

摘要

Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) systems, in which multiple agents communicate and co-operate with one another to achieve their individual and collective goals, are a promising enabling technology for constructing large, real-world industrial control applications. To facilitate the development of such systems a number of generic DAI frameworks have been devised. These frameworks typically aid the development process by providing a language, a set of structures, and/or some tools with which the necessary infrastructure and support mechanisms for interacting agents can be instantiated. The paper reports on one such framework, called ARCHON™, which has been used to build DAI systems in the following industrial control domains: electricity distribution management, electricity transportation management, cement factory control, particle accelerator control and flexible assembly robotic cells. A distinguishing and novel feature of the ARCHON framework is that it extends the level of support offered to the system builder — it provides generic and reusable knowledge about the process of co-operation, in addition to the more standard development facilities. This generic knowledge is embedded in a domain-independent co-ordination module and it is the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of this module which forms the major contribution of the paper.