Agents-based design for fault management systems in industrial processes

Industrial necessities claim global management procedures integrating information systems in order to manage and to use the whole information about controlled processes and thus, to assure a good process behaviour. Fault management and maintenance are vital aspects in industrial management, in this sense, maintenance systems should support decision-making tools, new maintenance approaches and techniques, the enterprise thinking and flexibility. In this work, a reference model for fault management in industrial processes is proposed. This model is based on a generic framework using multi-agent systems for distributed control systems; in this sense, the fault management problem is viewed like a feedback control process and the actions are related to the decision-making in the scheduling of the preventive maintenance task and the running of preventive and corrective specific maintenance tasks. A particular methodology permitting the conception and analysis of the agent systems is used for the agents design. As a result, a set of models describing the general characteristics of the agents, specific tasks, communications and coordination is obtained. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.