AGENT-BASED MONITORING, FAULT DETECTION, DIAGNOSIS AND CONTROL OF SPATIALLY DISTRIBUTED PROCESSES

There is a trend in the process industries towards the use of multiple small reconfigurable production units rather than a single large unit to increase production, product range and operation flexibility. Monitoring, supervision and control of these processes is difficult because traditional methods typically do not handle well the increased heterogeneity, nonlinearity and complexity. In this work, statistical multiblock process monitoring techniques and an agent- based diagnosis and control methodology are integrated. The performance of this combined monitoring-diagnosis-control system is illustrated with a case study using a network of spatially distributed reactors.