Ontologies and Decision Support for Failure Mitigation in Intelligent Water Distribution Networks

One of the greatest benefits offered by cyber-physical systems is the potential for automated decision support, which can increase the intelligence and efficacy of environmental management. Agent-based modeling can facilitate the application of cyber infrastructure to environmental decision support, by abstracting physically-distributed and communication and control into the operation of one or more agents. Ontologies can capture the semantics of the operation of both physical and cyber components of an environmental management system, respectively, while reflecting interactions between the two. As such, they can serve as a basis for automated reasoning by agents for intelligent decision support. In this paper, we illustrate and validate the use of ontologies in decision support for an intelligent water distribution network. The focus of the decision support is on identification and mitigation of failure, the aim is dependable distribution of potable water.