Application of agent technology concepts to the design of a fault-tolerant control system

This work concerns the applicability of agent technology concepts to the design of a plant fault-tolerant control system. The operation of the fault-tolerant system is enhanced by decomposing it into autonomous subsystems and by turning them into agents. The detailed development of one of the agents, the feed line of the process, is presented and its performance is tested by simulation. The proposed framework meets the control objectives and features a significant level of fault tolerance to sensor and actuator failures. This is achieved using an observer based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) unit. Moreover, this work shows how the control strategy may be altered to tackle a case of severely impacted control capability.