Distributed Intelligence
Natural living systems, such as plants and trees, have decentralized structure. A tree survives even when some of its branches are chopped off. Grass continues to grow after repeated mowing. However, top-down command and control is the norm for engineered
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Abstract Natural living systems, such as plants and trees, have decentralized structure. A tree survives even when some of its branches are chopped off. Grass continues to grow after repeated mowing. However, top-down command and control is the norm for engineered systems. There, a decision made at the highest level is transmitted to lower levels, where the task is usually executed in a very predictable fashion. Now with increasing size and complexity of engineered and other systems, there is a growing realization that their proper design and their needed robustness can only be achieved by increasing decentralization of their functions and their local intelligence. That is leading to the development of intelligent agent-based systems, which are applicable to wide varieties of applications. This chapter starts with the description of an on-board chilled water supply system on a navy ship whose robustness was increased by decentralizing its control structure. Then, there is discussion on the need for decentralized structure for complex systems. That is followed by a narrative on how computer software has evolved from simple programs with subroutines, to objects, and intelligent agents. Then, the advantages of intelligent agents are discussed in detail with application examples. Finally, there is a short discussion on agent-based modeling and simulation.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 A. Ghosh, Dynamic Systems for Everyone, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43943-3_7
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Dynamic Systems for Everyone
A Robust Chilled Water System
In the early 1990s, the Office of Naval Research in the USA was looking for a highly survivable robust system for distribution of chilled water in some of its ships. The supply of chilled water is vital to the proper working of an array of on-board equipment, such as combat systems, communication systems, radar, and sonar. The chilled water system removed heat generated by such equipment and was essential for their proper functioning. An interruption of its supply, even for a few minutes, could cause some of the equipment to shut down or fail to operate properly. The major requirement was that the chilled water system must continue to operate even after a major disturbance, such as a fire or missile strike somewhere on a ship. The resultant goal was for a highly resilient system with no single point of failure. In a conventional chilled water system, one controller is quite capable of handling its normal operations. However, a single controller makes the system vulnerable to a single point of failure. A single controller also makes the system rigid and difficult to expand and maintain as its requirements evolve. After investigating many different approaches to address this problem, a system with highly distributed intelligence was proposed. The system was then designed and built with a number of intelligent controllers that offered both reasoning and real-time control functions. Each of these controllers was physically located near a set of equipment that needed chill
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