Holonic Multiagent-Based System for Distributed Control of Semi-industrial Pilot Plants

Semi-industrial pilot plants are the best experimental domain for advanced control systems testing with the real-world instrumentation. At the same time, inexpensive flexible process real-time simulators and virtual soft controllers are indispensable in the research and education field. Integrating control instrumentation of varying manufacturers, plant simulators, and virtual controllers into uniform system capable of flexible research and educational experiments is a complex problem to solve. A tool is needed to describe and organise knowledge on such integrated structure involving many communication channels and using distributed processing power. In the presented case-study, holarchy paradigm is applied, resulting in an untypical holonic multiagent system. The concept, architecture and development of application framework for the system are presented thoroughly in the paper.