Agent-based intelligent monitoring in large-scale continuous material transport

To maintain the reliability of material transport systems, monitoring of the entire system is required to optimize maintenance and operational control strategies. Traditional monitoring mainly focuses on individual subsystems and components. Due to the high distribution and system complexity, the monitoring and control of large-scale material transport systems need to be carried out in intelligent ways with integrated information. Agent technology, as an artificial intelligence methodology to handle the complexity of distributed systems, has been introduced in the field of continuous material conveying. This paper presents a multi-agent system (MAS) for the intelligent monitoring in large-scale continuous material transport. Under an agent-based architecture, annalistic and diagnostic entities and operational decision-making are carried out by the agents that monitor individual system parts and components. These agents are integrated together to form cooperative communities to achieve the goals of individual agents and, especially, of the monitoring system as a whole. This paper discusses the architecture, functions, knowledge organization and agent communication of the MAS. A prototype of the agent-based intelligent monitoring has been built in laboratory environment. The implementation of the agent system has showed successful single agent functioning and the cooperation and the coordination between multiple agents. The application of agent technology reduces the complexity of the large-scale monitoring system by means of integrating individual monitoring systems.