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Agents-based design for fault management systems in industrial processes

Abstract:

Industrial necessities claim global management procedures integrating information systems in order to manage and to use the whole information about controlled processes and thus, to assure a good process behaviour. Fault management and maintenance are vital aspects in industrial management, in this sense, maintenance systems should support decision-making tools, new maintenance approaches and techniques, the enterprise thinking and flexibility. In this work, a reference model for fault management in industrial processes is proposed. This model is based on a generic framework using multi-agent systems for distributed control systems; in this sense, the fault management problem is viewed like a feedback control process and the actions are related to the decision-making in the scheduling of the preventive maintenance task and the running of preventive and corrective specific maintenance tasks. A particular methodology permitting the conception and analysis of the agent systems is used for the agents design. As a result, a set of models describing the general characteristics of the agents, specific tasks, communications and coordination is obtained. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.