Distributed coordination is advantageous over centralized alternatives for its ability in providing enhanced availability, reliability and performance. Seamless information dissemination across infrastructures is only possible by developing a framework for gathering distributed intelligence over a hostless architecture. DI includes information fusion across heterogeneous sources for threat/anomaly identification, distributed control of DERs for optimal load following, inherently intelligent distributed control mechanisms, etc.
Distributed agent framework is a demonstrative technology towards a mechanism to aggregate distributed intelligence. Agents are a novel mechanism by which a hostless distributed intelligence gathering can be achieved with very low communication overhead but arriving at a reliable context-aware decision. The framework can be developed as platform-independent for deployment across heterogeneous architecture. Each such agent is self-aware and understands the local context within which it exists, the global implications of its actions, and its obligations as a member of the collaborative system. Such framework will facilitate a reasoning ability to perform decision-making in a dynamic environment to be able to make informed reliable real-time decisions in the face of a dynamically changing process environment along with autonomous behavior to make decisions on its own or as part of a larger aggregate system.
