Multi-Agent System Enhanced Supervision of Process Automation

This paper studies issues concerning the application of user configurable cooperative information agents for monitoring tasks in process automation. Within this application area the amount of information gathered from the processes has been growing vastly and the supervising personnel has been minimized in the production plants. As this trend seems to keep going further, the end users need more effective information handling tools. However, the information overflow problem has also shown up in other application domains, and it is useful to discuss the similarities and differences with solutions used in these areas. This paper proposes an agent-based architecture to support active monitoring of the changes in process related data situated in various heterogeneous information sources. This approach is based on a BDI agent model, where individual user-configurable information processing modules are flexibly linked. The approach is demonstrated with an industrially inspired test scenario