Model Sharing and Scalability in the Real-Time Simulation and Intelligent Hierarchical Control of Discrete-Event Systems

Large-scale automated systems such as manufacturing systems, transportation systems, the Smart Grid and many others are continuously becoming larger, more distributed, more complex, and more intelligent. There is a growing expectation that their software controller will make real-time intelligent decisions, at all levels of the control hierarchy that make up the enterprise. The need is changing for distributed intelligent controllers that are scalable to arbitrarily large systems. In this paper, we first present the model explosion problem. This problem arises when every controller in the control hierarchy is to have a unique simulation model of its unique control domain to use in its decision-making process. That is, the modeling effort needed to provide intelligence to all controllers in the control hierarchy grows exponentially with the number of controllers in the hierarchy using current modeling technology. Since each controller is in a unique location within the control hierarchy, each will need to have its simulation model custom made for its unique control domain, leading to the scalability issue that we refer to as the model explosion problem. Next, a new modeling paradigm that solves the scalability issue resulting from the model explosion problem is presented, where the simulation models are automatically generated by recycling the models used for control. If the controller models are created using the presented modeling paradigm, then these same models can be used for simulation with no modification or the need to understand the control logic. Furthermore, gathering the state from the physical system being controlled to initialize the simulation models in a real-time control application becomes a trivial operation of simply coping data from one software model to its identical copy, without the need to interpret the meaning of the data. Finally, an example of a hierarchical controller to control a small physical model of a manufacturing plant is presented. We show how we automatically generated all the simulation models in the control hierarchy without any modification and with minimal effort, and used them to make intelligent decisions in real time.