Indirect Process Monitoring with Constraint Handling Agents

An approach to indirect process monitoring based on a society of constraint handling agents is presented in this paper. According to this approach an operator of a process automation system can define monitoring tasks which a group of agents perform proactively. The monitoring tasks are assumed to be composites and refer to several process measurements. The purpose of the monitoring agents is to enhance the work of the operator by letting him to supervise the indirect monitoring tasks instead of following a large amount of measurement data. The monitoring agents operate as a multi-agent system consisting of agents with constraint handling capabilities. The agents can setup and execute user configured monitoring tasks cooperatively. Constraints are used as one method for modeling the monitoring logic of the agents. The approach is illustrated with a test scenario using measurement data from an industrial process.