ABSTRACT A lab-scale hardware DC MicroGrid system has been designed and built as part of a suite ... more ABSTRACT A lab-scale hardware DC MicroGrid system has been designed and built as part of a suite of electrical grid simulation environments. It is intended for use as an educational tool and in research as a testbed for control strategy development. The testbed has the capability to rapidly transition between hardware and software simulation of the DC MicroGrid system and consists of three components: Software in the Loop Simulation (SILS), Hardware in the Loop Simulation (HILS), and Hardware. SILS uses a PLC emulator and a Simulink model to simulate the plant and control system. In HILS, the emulator is replaced with an actual hardware controller. In the transition from HILS to hardware, a software switch shifts the PLC I/O from the model to the PLC I/O modules connected to the DC MicroGrid. In tandem with the PLC ladder code, Rockwell Automation's agent-based distributed control software enables the investigation of complex interactions between autonomous decision makers on the grid.
The ability to automatically reconfigure a ship’s engineering plant in response to changing missi... more The ability to automatically reconfigure a ship’s engineering plant in response to changing mission or equipment conditions can dramatically increase a ship’s capability and survivability. A COTS-based, distributed control architecture for providing missionand diagnostic-driven reconfiguration of the engineering plant has been developed under a cooperative program between Rockwell and the Office of Naval Research. The architecture is based on the use of software agents distributed among networked automation controllers. Each agent represents a physical resource in the engineering plant (e.g., a chilled water plant, a generator, a pump); the agents cooperate autonomously to create a control plan that can achieve the mission objective based on the available resources/agents. Diagnostic models are embedded in the agents to identify faulty or damaged system components when abnormal operating behavior is detected. After a faulty component is identified, the agents negotiate to generate a...
The broad context of this literature review is the connected manufacturing enterprise, characteri... more The broad context of this literature review is the connected manufacturing enterprise, characterized by a data environment such that the size, structure and variety of information strain the capability of traditional software and database tools to effectively capture, store, manage and analyze it. This paper surveys and discusses representative examples of existing research into approaches for feature set reduction in the big data environment, focusing on three contexts: general industrial applications; specific industrial applications such as fault detection or fault prediction; and data reduction. The conclusion from this review is that there is room for research into frameworks or approaches to feature filtration and prioritization, specifically with respect to providing quantitative or qualitative information about the individual features in the dataset that can be used to rank features against each other. A byproduct of this gap is a tendency for analysts not to holistically ge...
Power Engineering Society, IEEE General Meeting, 2007
We are interested in providing an agent infrastructure for truly distributed control. Requirement... more We are interested in providing an agent infrastructure for truly distributed control. Requirements include multiple language implementations so that this agent host environment can exist in both real-time controllers and contain the ability to operate with external agent systems. Our first infrastructure, the Autonomous Cooperative System (ACS), accomplished these goals, but presented other issues. Although ACS has been successfully deployed
As control systems grow more and more complex, the level of testing and validation needs to be ri... more As control systems grow more and more complex, the level of testing and validation needs to be rigorous which in turn improves the robustness and reliability of the control system. We propose a testing and validation scenario where we create a multi-agent distributed simulation environment, and where the control and plant algorithms are executed on real-time targets. This simulation environment
Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing, 2007
Cohesion and coupling are standard concepts in computer science. As in classic software, multi-ag... more Cohesion and coupling are standard concepts in computer science. As in classic software, multi-agent systems (MASs) strive for high cohesion and low coupling. But MASs, by definition, do have some coupling, i.e., the agents seek out and discover other agents, and negotiate and cooperate with them, to accomplish some overall goal. Moreover, as different events occur, and different agents and
International Workshop of Central and Eastern Europe on Multi-Agent Systems, 2003
In the 21st century, industrial automation will be greatly benefited by the advances in electroni... more In the 21st century, industrial automation will be greatly benefited by the advances in electronics, information systems, and process technology. However, these technological advances are still separate islands of automation. We believe that multi-agent systems will help the future of automation by providing flexible and scalable ways to integrate the different parts. This paper reports preliminary results of an ongoing
IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2004
In this paper, we share our experience of the real-time aspects of collaborative intelligent syst... more In this paper, we share our experience of the real-time aspects of collaborative intelligent systems. We discuss the representation of application domain knowledge using a job description language (JDL) and FIPA specification. We also present the architecture of the intelligent agents that enables the integration of knowledge and system capabilities. Finally, we describe aspects of collaborative systems relative to system
ABSTRACT A lab-scale hardware DC MicroGrid system has been designed and built as part of a suite ... more ABSTRACT A lab-scale hardware DC MicroGrid system has been designed and built as part of a suite of electrical grid simulation environments. It is intended for use as an educational tool and in research as a testbed for control strategy development. The testbed has the capability to rapidly transition between hardware and software simulation of the DC MicroGrid system and consists of three components: Software in the Loop Simulation (SILS), Hardware in the Loop Simulation (HILS), and Hardware. SILS uses a PLC emulator and a Simulink model to simulate the plant and control system. In HILS, the emulator is replaced with an actual hardware controller. In the transition from HILS to hardware, a software switch shifts the PLC I/O from the model to the PLC I/O modules connected to the DC MicroGrid. In tandem with the PLC ladder code, Rockwell Automation's agent-based distributed control software enables the investigation of complex interactions between autonomous decision makers on the grid.
The ability to automatically reconfigure a ship’s engineering plant in response to changing missi... more The ability to automatically reconfigure a ship’s engineering plant in response to changing mission or equipment conditions can dramatically increase a ship’s capability and survivability. A COTS-based, distributed control architecture for providing missionand diagnostic-driven reconfiguration of the engineering plant has been developed under a cooperative program between Rockwell and the Office of Naval Research. The architecture is based on the use of software agents distributed among networked automation controllers. Each agent represents a physical resource in the engineering plant (e.g., a chilled water plant, a generator, a pump); the agents cooperate autonomously to create a control plan that can achieve the mission objective based on the available resources/agents. Diagnostic models are embedded in the agents to identify faulty or damaged system components when abnormal operating behavior is detected. After a faulty component is identified, the agents negotiate to generate a...
The broad context of this literature review is the connected manufacturing enterprise, characteri... more The broad context of this literature review is the connected manufacturing enterprise, characterized by a data environment such that the size, structure and variety of information strain the capability of traditional software and database tools to effectively capture, store, manage and analyze it. This paper surveys and discusses representative examples of existing research into approaches for feature set reduction in the big data environment, focusing on three contexts: general industrial applications; specific industrial applications such as fault detection or fault prediction; and data reduction. The conclusion from this review is that there is room for research into frameworks or approaches to feature filtration and prioritization, specifically with respect to providing quantitative or qualitative information about the individual features in the dataset that can be used to rank features against each other. A byproduct of this gap is a tendency for analysts not to holistically ge...
Power Engineering Society, IEEE General Meeting, 2007
We are interested in providing an agent infrastructure for truly distributed control. Requirement... more We are interested in providing an agent infrastructure for truly distributed control. Requirements include multiple language implementations so that this agent host environment can exist in both real-time controllers and contain the ability to operate with external agent systems. Our first infrastructure, the Autonomous Cooperative System (ACS), accomplished these goals, but presented other issues. Although ACS has been successfully deployed
As control systems grow more and more complex, the level of testing and validation needs to be ri... more As control systems grow more and more complex, the level of testing and validation needs to be rigorous which in turn improves the robustness and reliability of the control system. We propose a testing and validation scenario where we create a multi-agent distributed simulation environment, and where the control and plant algorithms are executed on real-time targets. This simulation environment
Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing, 2007
Cohesion and coupling are standard concepts in computer science. As in classic software, multi-ag... more Cohesion and coupling are standard concepts in computer science. As in classic software, multi-agent systems (MASs) strive for high cohesion and low coupling. But MASs, by definition, do have some coupling, i.e., the agents seek out and discover other agents, and negotiate and cooperate with them, to accomplish some overall goal. Moreover, as different events occur, and different agents and
International Workshop of Central and Eastern Europe on Multi-Agent Systems, 2003
In the 21st century, industrial automation will be greatly benefited by the advances in electroni... more In the 21st century, industrial automation will be greatly benefited by the advances in electronics, information systems, and process technology. However, these technological advances are still separate islands of automation. We believe that multi-agent systems will help the future of automation by providing flexible and scalable ways to integrate the different parts. This paper reports preliminary results of an ongoing
IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2004
In this paper, we share our experience of the real-time aspects of collaborative intelligent syst... more In this paper, we share our experience of the real-time aspects of collaborative intelligent systems. We discuss the representation of application domain knowledge using a job description language (JDL) and FIPA specification. We also present the architecture of the intelligent agents that enables the integration of knowledge and system capabilities. Finally, we describe aspects of collaborative systems relative to system
Uploads
Papers by Francisco Maturana