An Agent-Based Environment for Rmote Diagnosis, Supervision and Control

Mobile agent technology offers a number of characteristics that make it well suited for distributed information retrieval and monitoring tasks. We present an agent-based environment that provides facilities and tools for remote diagnosis, supervision and control of process automation systems. The described environment allows remote and dynamic configuration of diagnosis and supervision components, offers a framework for observing and controlling existing (legacy) software, and is also suited for other application domains than process automation. 1: Introduction and Overview In this paper we describe an agent-based environment for remote diagnosis, supervision and control of process automation systems. The term agent is currently being used for a wide variety of software systems. Franklin [5] distinguishes, e.g., adaptive agents, autonomous agents, communicative agents, and mobile agents. The environment described in this paper is based on mobile agents. Mobile agents are software components with a certain degree of autonomy that have the ability to transport themselves from one location in a network to another (see [2], [5], [10]). The work described is part of a research cooperation with Siemens Germany. The major aim of this cooperation is to explore the potential of agent-based architectures for remote diagnosis, supervision and control of steel automation systems. The reason for investigation was the realization, that the general problem frame has a number of characteristics including distributed information retrieval, monitoring and notification, as well as parallel processing, which make the problem a typical one suitable for mobile agent technology (see [2], [8], [9] and [10]). Agent-based systems have been developed in other domains as well, e.g., scientific computing, internet information retrieval, simulation, and e-commerce. A recent overview of such systems can be found in [13]. Although our investigations concentrate on the process automation domain, the developed components, frameworks, and tools, are also useful in other domains. The work addresses issues like dynamic configuration and integration of native system interfaces, which are important for mobile-agent systems in general. In the next section we describe the primary application domain to provide a general understanding of the problem frame. In Section 3 we outline important requirements on the architecture of our environment. In Sections 4 we present the overall architecture with respect to the requirements described in Section 3. In Section 5 we describe some examples of the