A constructing scheme for autonomous distributed control systems with multi-agent society

Autonomous distributed control (ADC), as a promising approach in dealing with complex control problems, is capturing the attention of automation specialists, yet there is still no available platform supporting its industrial application. This paper introduces an ongoing project toward this goal, carried out in our laboratory. In this work, we use agents and an agent society to model an ADC system. We propose a new agent architecture for intelligent machines and a supervisor agent for humans to provide supervision control for agents. To facilitate the coordinating behaviors of agents, an agent communication language called CCL (Cooperative Command Language) is developed, and an object-oriented implementation of the proposed agent system is presented, too. Furthermore, the support system under development is introduced in a simple way. A case study concerning the shape control of a variable-geometry truss is also given to show the availability of the agent system.