DESIGNING AN AUTOMATED CODE GENERATOR FOR MULTI-AGENT BASED PROCESS CONTROL AND MONITORING

Abstract

Five classes of intelligent agents namely one class of process control agent and four classes of state control agents have been identified as being sufficient for use in the implementation of any process control system which can be represented as an Algorithmic State Machine (ASM) chart. One class of process monitoring agent and four classes of state monitor agents have also been identified as being sufficient for the monitoring of any process control system that can be represented in the form of an ASM chart. These two sets of five intelligent agents form the basis for automated code generation for process control and monitoring because their codes are object-oriented and reusable. A new process control software can be fully specified simply by using agents which are instantiations of the agents control classes. Similarly, any monitoring software can be formulated by using agents which are instantiations of the agent monitoring classes. Both control and monitoring agents can be automatically created after prompting the user for values derived from the ASM chart representing the process control system. Such values are easily discernible when the ASM chart is converted into the corresponding fully expanded STT. If needed, these values can be taken from a pre-stored database table by the automatic code generator. When both the process control software and the process monitoring software can be automatically generated, the platform that offers this facility becomes unique to any process control system developer interested in automatic code generation.