Adaptive Agent-Based SCADA System
For engineers designing modern SCADA systems, this offers an adaptive approach to manage heterogeneous components in dynamic environments, though it is an incremental application of MAS to a known domain.
The paper proposes an adaptive agent-based SCADA system using multi-agent systems to handle complexity and distribution, demonstrating continuous performance improvement in simulation.
Modern supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems comprise variety of industrial equipment such as physical control processes, logical control systems, communication networks, computers, and communication protocols. They are concerned with control and supervision of production control processes. Modern SCADA networks contain highly distributed information, control, and location. Moreover, they contain large number of heterogeneous components situated in highly changing and uncertain environments. As a result, engineering modern SCADA is a challenging issue and conventional engineering approaches are no longer suitable for them because of their increasing complexity and highly distribution. In this research, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are used to enable building adaptive agent-based SCADA system by modeling system components as agents in the micro level and as organizations or societies of agents in the macro level. A prototype has been implemented and evaluated within a simulation environment for demonstrating the adaptive behavior of the system-to-be, which results in continuous improvement of system performance.