Distributed knowledge-based computer-aided control education environment

ONTO-Cele is a knowledge-based educational software for control engineering that solves and presents to the student the process for controller design with the root locus method. This software generates a huge amount of data by firing rules against the problem data and storing it in a knowledge base that is later used to feed a graphical user interface to interact with the student. The software is computation intensive and its execution time can be reduced by making it work in a distributed architecture, in such a way that some of the rules are executed concurrently. The paper shows a solution based on the use of a multi-agent paradigm, giving details about its implementation and presenting the results obtained.