Technological Considerations for Devs-Based System Control

Abstract

System control has grown from manual control where humans sense the environment, analyse the result and determine control actions to semi-automated control. In semi-automated control sensing is done by sensing devices and with the help of communication technologies, humans at a control centre view the environment, analyse it and determine control action. However, advances in computational and processing technologies has now shifted the most important role of making control decisions away from humans, to microcontrollers/microprocessors. The problem now is how to make these devices intelligent enough to make the best control decision. Different control methods have been used in system control they include, the proportion integral derivative (PID) control, Model-Based control and control based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). We proposed an architecture and explored technologies that can be used to realize Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS)-Based Control, which is a Model-Based approach. The proposed approach is based on a simulation model rather than the optimization model used in other Model-Based system control approaches. Using DEVS in system control, we can model physical systems to be controlled, run a fast simulation of the system based on the current state of the system and determine control actions. Two-fold Communication issues were identified and the research addressed different methods of solving the two-fold communication problems.