A decision support system with distributed agents for large-scale process control

As CIM systems are being developed to assist plant managers and operators with real-time monitoring and control, the need for decision support systems (DSS) becomes apparent so as to investigate alternative control strategies, fault diagnosis and alarming situations. As processes become more complex the need to consider also the environmental impact, on top of the commonly used economical factors, leads to new system architectures and multi-objective optimization. In this paper, a DSS architecture is presented considering distributed agents taking into account a multiplicity of impact factors in order to improve overall process operation.