FIPA agent based network distributed control system

Abstract

A control system with the capabilities to combine heteregeneous control systems or processes into a uniform homogeneous environment is discussed. This dynamically extensible system is an example of the software system at the agent level of abstraction. This level of abstraction considers agents as atomic entities that communicate to implement the functionality of the control system. Agents engineering aspects are addressed by adopting the domain independent software standard, formulated by FIPA. Jade core Java classes are used as a FIPA specification implementation. A special, lightweight, XML RDFS based, control oriented, ontology markup language is developed to standardize the description of the arbitrary control system data processor. Control processes, described in this language, are integrated into the global system at runtime, without actual programming. Fault tolerance and recovery issues are also addressed.