- Concurrent engineering / distributed systems
- jointly with Dr. W.F.S.
(Skip) Poehlman
The overall objective of this research program is to develop and integrate
diverse and disparate operational support agents for real-time complex plant
process management. These agents include data acquisition, monitoring (trend
analysis and alarm annunciation), simulation and analysis (both quantitative
and qualitative), diagnosis, and planning. When integrated into a cohesive
whole, these agents constitute a Performance Support System (PSS) whose purpose
is to assist the plant operators and technical support units so that they
can perform at the optimum capacity. This is motivated by the increased sensor
density and complexity inherent in today's nuclear plants which lead to operator
information overload.
- R8 (1987), C23 (1988),
J10 (1989) - The beginnings of the building
a society of computing agents distributed over the network, all acting as
a team to model a nuclear system and provide support to the technical personnel
of operating nuclear reactors.
- C31 (1991) - An accelerator application.
- C34 (1992) - Multitasking investigation.
- R12 (1992) - A survey of the field in Canada.
- C37 (1993) - Here, the human is brought into
the loop and the problem decomposition is analysed in this light.
- C39 (1993) - The Role of AI in the Engineering
Domain.
- C41 (1993) - Example of the OPUS implementation
of the above concepts. A workshop was held at McMaster on campus in 1994
based on a working system of 4 networked computers with 14 executables (DOS,
UNIX, OS/2) interacting via X-Windows. Full proceedings are available upon
request.
- J15 (1993) - Example of concepts applied
to an accelerator.
- C42 (1993) - Presentation of the concepts at
an international conference.
- C46 (1995) - Implementation of HCI.
- C49 (1996)- MACSIM (OPUS applied to MNR). This
is where we were as of 1996 as a result of a shift in focus to our own reactor
(MNR).
- C59 (2004) - MNRSIM - LabWindows-based desktop simulator of MNR.