Agile Plant Management Using Agents and Mobile Devices: Enhancing Collaboration and Information Integration in Large-Scale

In this paper, we introduce a mobile device enabled multi-agent system that aims at more effective information integration for large-scale plant management. In our approach, different agents are in charge of individual plant units, plant activities (e.g., scheduling), and human-computer interface. Agents residing in mobile devices enable operators to access critical plant information, process data, and make decisions in a remote and around-the-clock fashion. The effectiveness of the system has been demonstrated with an implementation to manage a virtual plan.