Agent-Based, Distributed Diagnosis for Shipboard Systems

The ability to reconfigure a ship's engineering plant in response to changing mission or equipment conditions can dramatically increase a ship's capability and survivability. We describe the agent-based, distributed diagnostic aspects of a distributed control architecture that integrates multiple ship systems and provides resourceand diagnostic-driven reconfiguration at multiple system levels, such as mission-level, process-level and component-level. We embed systemand subsystem models in distributed, agent-based components to provide distributed diagnostics. We demonstrate this architecture using a shipboard chilled water system application.