Decentralized agent-based control of chilled water plants using wireless sensor and actuator networks

The resiliency of a ship is dependent upon the resiliency of the various engineering plants that operate the ship. Especially for combatant ships, engineering plants must be reconfigurable when damage occurs to ensure the ship has fight-through capabilities. Furthermore, reduced manning on ships necessitates the automated operation of engineering plants, especially their reconfiguration during times of battle damage. Wireless telemetry has been proposed in lieu of traditional tethered architectures for the monitoring and control of shipboard engineering plants. In this study, wireless nodes capable of sensing and actuation are explored for the automated control of a chilled water plant. A utility oriented agent-based control network is proposed as a scalable and robust approach to the automated configuration of a chilled water plant. To illustrate the performance of the proposed control and reconfiguration architecture, a small-scale chilled water demonstrator is utilized. A network of wireless sensing and actuation nodes are shown to be highly effective in monitoring and reconfiguring the chilled water plant under varying operational conditions to achieve its operational objectives.