Agents & Services

The unique feature which sets this framework apart from conventional control systems is its incorporation of intelligent agent concepts. An agent is a software entity capable of acting intelligently on behalf of a component or user, in order to accomplish a given task. A group of specialized agents cooperate and work together to solve problems that are beyond their individual capabilities.

AFECS provides a group of normative agents for agent management and coordination. These manager agents are responsible for creating and deploying agents on a platform, educating them (based on knowledge provided by the user), distributing them over the network, and recovering them in case of unsatisfactory behavior. The efforts of these specialized agents ensure control system reliability and robustness.

Different types of “stem cell” agents are also provided by the framework. After creation they are specialized by the control system designer to become representative agents for various real world components of the control system.

An experiment can be thought of as a well-defined set of components, each with their specific behaviors. These behaviors can be represented by simple, finite state machines. Control of the experiment is equivalent to controlling and synchronizing the state changes of those state machines, and AFECS provides the facilities to do this. An algorithm that coordinates state changes is called service.