Distributed Fault Detection and Diagnosis of Chemical Process Based on MAS

Multi-agent technology offers a number of characteristics that make it well suited for distributed process monitoring and fault diagnosis tasks. In this paper we introduce a multi-agent architecture to implement distributed applications for chemical process monitoring and diagnosis as a set of cooperating intelligent agents. The agents appeared in this application are defined in ADL (Agent Description Language), a high-level specification language, and interchange data/knowledge through service requests using a common knowledge representation language. Elements of a multi-agent framework that is being used to support this complex distributed application, and the mechanisms used for agent usability within the chemical process environment are also described.