Design of a Multi-Agent System for Process Monitoring and Supervision

New process monitoring and control strategies are developing every day together with process automation strategies to satisfy the needs of diverse industries. Fault detection and diagnosis are some of the new and promising growth areas in process control. With the help of the development of powerful computer systems, the extensive amount of process data from all over the plant can be put to use in an efficient manner by storing and manipulation. With this development, data-driven process monitoring approaches had the chance to emerge compared to model-based approaches. Therefore, the objective of this research is to layout the basis for designing and implementing a multi-agent system for process monitoring and supervision. The agent-based programming approach adopted in the research provides a number of advantages, such as, flexibility, adaptation and ease of use. The designed multi-agent system allows: a) easy manipulation and preprocessing of plant data both for training and online application; b) detection of process faults; and c) diagnosis of the source of the fault.