Designing Multi-agent Systems for Resilient Engineering Systems

Our modern life has grown to depend on many and nearly ubiquitous large complex engineering systems. Many disciplines now seemingly ask the same question: “In the face of assumed disruption, to what degree will these systems continue to perform and when will they bounce back to normal operation”. This presentation argues that multi-agent systems (MAS), as decentralized and intelligent control systems, have an indispensable role to play in enabling the overall resilience of the combined cyber-physical engineering system. To that effect, it first draws from recently published work that provides measures of resilience for large flexible engineering systems. These measures define the system’s actual & latent resilience as it goes through physical disruptions. The role of a multi-agent system is then introduced so as to intelligently bring about reconfigurations that restore the system performance back to its original level. Naturally, the implementation of such a multi-agent system requires a distributed architecture. To this effect, the recent literature has used the quantitative resilience measures to distill a set of principles that design resilience into the multi-agent system. These are specifically discussed in the context of production systems and power grids. The presentation concludes with several avenues for advancing multi-agent systems to support resilient engineering systems.