PPDC Blackboard Broadcasting in Agent-Based Distributed Process Control

Abstract

There is an increasing demand in modern industrial process control for advanced control strategies e.g. sustaining controlled oscillations, which cannot be performed with classical determined control algorithms. At the same time, the class of continuous industrial processes is well-fitted to agent-based control, where the state of the control system is held and processed as a blackboard. A framework is proposed to support such agent-based advanced control systems. The framework is based on the idea of cyclical blackboard broadcasting in order to keep the distributed control system synchronised. The primary component of the framework is the specifically developed networking protocol, based on a real-time architecture adopted from the industrial informatics domain. The approach ensures strict time-determinism of the inter-agent communication, which is required for continuous process control but is not supported in the already existing multi-agent environments.