Magdi S. Mahmoud
Systems Engineering Department, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia

An integral ingredient to the operation of industrial or engineering systems, including cooperative robotics, sensor networks, and grid computing, is its control architecture consisting of hardware and software protocols for exchanging system status and control signals. In conventional systems, this is accomplished by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Current trends to control and monitor the operation of industrial or engineering systems are however moving toward the use of an automated agent technology, which is generally known as a multiagent system (MAS). A multiagent system is a combination of several agents working in collaboration pursuing assigned tasks to achieve the overall goal of the system. The MAS has become an increasingly powerful tool in developing complex systems that take advantages of agent properties and it is autonomous in that they operate without human interventions.

In this presentation, we focus control strategies pertaining to MAS. Specifically, we address three classes of strategies:

• Distributed Strategies in which the agent (local) control is equipped with additional information from neighbors (agent-to-agent communication) to achieve the global motion-coordination task.
  
  
• Decentralized Strategies in which of the agent (local) controls are independent but collaborate in harmony with the aid of a central coordinator to attain the overall cited goal.
  
  
• Cloud-based Strategies in which the autonomous agents are required to achieve a common coordination objective by exchanging data over a shared cloud registry. The registry is accessed asynchronously by different agents, and direct inter-agent communication is not possible. 

Our main goal is illuminate the merits/demerits of the foregoing strategies as well as the potential application of each. In addition, we discuss several possible extensions for industrial multiagent control systems.

Magdi S. Mahmoud has been a Professor of Engineering since 1984. He is now a Distinguished Professor at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia. He was on the faculty at different universities worldwide including Egypt (CU, AUC), Kuwait (KU), UAE (UAEU), UK (UMIST), USA (Pitt, Case Western), Singapore (Nanyang) and Australia (Adelaide). He lectured in Venezuela (Caracas), Germany (Hanover), UK ((Kent), USA (UoSA), Canada (Montreal) and China (BIT, Yanshan). He is the principal author of fifty-one (51) books, inclusive book-chapters and the author/co-author of more than 610 peer-reviewed papers. He is a fellow of the IEE, a senior member of the IEEE, the CEI (UK), and a registered consultant engineer of information engineering and systems (Egypt). He received the Science State Incentive Prize for outstanding research in engineering, (1978, 1986), the State Medal for Science and Arts, First Class, (1978), and the State Distinction Award, (1986), Egypt. He awarded the Abdul Hameed Showman Prize for Young Arab Scientists in Engineering Sciences, (1986), Jordan. In 1992, he received the Distinguished Engineering Research Award, Kuwait University, (1992), Kuwait. He is co-winner of the Most Cited Paper Award 2009, ``Signal Processing", vol. 86, no. 1, 2006, pp. 140-152. His papers were selected among the 40 best papers in Electrical & Electronic Engineering by the Web of Science ISI in July 2012. He interviewed for ``People in Control", IEEE Control Systems Magazine, August 2010. He served as Guest Editor for the special issue ``Neural Networks and Intelligence Systems in Neurocomputing" and Guest Editor for the ``2015 International Symposium on Web of Things and Big Data (WoTBD 2015)" 18--20 October 2015, Manama, Bahrain. He is a Regional Editor (Middle East and Africa) of International Journal of Systems, Control and Communications (JSCC), INDERSCIENCE Publishers since 2007, member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Numerical Algebra, Control and Optimization (NACO), Australia since 2010, an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Systems Dynamics Applications (IJSDA), since 2011, member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Engineering anagement, USA since 2012 and an Academic Member of Athens Institute for Education and Research, Greece since 2015. Since 2016, He is an Editor of the Journal Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Hindawi Publishing Company, USA. He is currently actively engaged in teaching and research in the development of modern methodologies to distributed control and filtering, networked control systems, fault-tolerant systems, cyberphysical systems and information technology.

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