Outline

• Industrial Control - Evolution or Revolution?
  • Yesterday - “Status Quo” - DCS/PLC Control Systems
  • Today - “Latest” developments - Networked I/O
  • Tomorrow - “Intelligent” I/O - Peer-to-peer “host-less” I/O
  • Future - “Self-organizing” Systems - Intelligent Agent-based Systems
• Yesterday - Centralized Hierarchical control
  • DCS
  • PLCs
• Today - Industrial Networks
  • Same paradigm - centralized controls
  • Fieldbus
  • BACnet
  • MAP
• Disadvantages of Current Controls
  • Still largely Master-Slave architectures
  • PLC represents the control intelligence
  • DCS is the coordinating intelligence
  • Rooted in the Past
  • Deterministic algorithms
  • I/O is still relatively “slave” intelligence
  • Lots of different interface protocols
  • Struggle for inter-operability
• Tomorrow is already here - Peer-to-peer I/O
  • “Autonomous” - self-acting I/O
  • Local intelligence (CPU and memory)
  • Peer-to-peer communications
  • No “Host” or Central Intelligence
  • The “Ghost-Host”
  • Central “supervisor” for configuration
  • Network computers provide HMI(MMI
• What is the name for this new Constrol Science?
  • Chaos Control ?
  • Complexity Control ?
  • Autonomous I/O Systems ?
  • Peer-to-Peer Control Systems ?
• Today - Autonomous I/O
  • Approaching “Intelligent Agents”
  • Peer-to-peer interactive controls
  • Algorithmic, rule-based controls
  • Can be made “robust” with algorithms
  • Fault-tolerance with redundancy
  • Still relatively “deterministic”
  • Programming rooted in past practice
• Intelligent, Distributed Control
  • Networks of intelligent devices, called nodes, that communicate using a common protocol
  • Each node contains embedded intelligence that implements the protocol and performs the node's algorithmic control functions
  • Each node includes a media interface which couples the node's processing resources with the communications media
  • Peer-to-peer communication capability that does not require intervention by a master controller
• “Holonic Fractal Manufacturing based on autonomous, multi-purpose, modular and re-configurable production lines/cells will allow production of many different products of any quantity”
  - Odo Struger - Allen-Bradley
• Can intelligent systems become self-organizing? The essential ingredients
  • Re-programmability (by others) over the network
  • Ability to change “behavior” (self-re-programming) Based on external or internal stimuli/algorithms
• Critical Complexity
  • When does processing power become intelligence?
  • When does connected intelligence become "self-organizing"?
• Non-deterministic behavious of self-organized control systems
  • Can we make “control systems” self-organizing?
  • If we “give up”on deterministic behavior, we’d have to insert the equivalent of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics - Specifically dis-allow certain harmful characteristics, or behaviors
• Pinto's Laws of Self-organizing Controls
  Control Systems will :
  • maximize benefits
  • minimize waste, and
  • prevent accidents or harmful effects
• Optimum Complexity - Chaitin Corollary
  • The “task” of a self-organizing control system would be to achieve control using the most-effective (shortest) control-algorithm.
• Stuart Kaufman - Santa Fe /95
  “Are there complex systems which cannot, in principle, be assembled by an evolutionary process?”
  Perhaps self-organizing control systems can “evolve” to levels of control and emergent complexity far beyond anything imagined by conventional “deterministic” control systems.
• Stuart Kaufman
  • "When a system of simple inter-acting components reaches a certain level of complexity or inter-connectedness, it undergoes a dramatic transition, or phase change."
• Chris Langton
  • A systems computational capability peaks in a narrow regime between highly periodic and chaotic behavior.
• Who will make the revolutionary breakthrough?
  • “I am convinced that the nations and people who master the new sciences of complexity will become the economic, cultural and political super-powers of the next century”
    - Heinz Pagels - the Dreams of Reason ('87)

Web Hotlinks (click on any item)

CHAOS - Making a New Science - By: James Glieck
Instrumentation & Control - Frontiers of a New Millennium
The TRULY Distributed Control Revolution
Predictions & Possibilities
Intelligence & Consciousness in the New Age