Initial risk assessment of emergency events in cooperative operating control

It is often encountered some cases in the industrial control systems, where emergency situations require a vital, irreversible, and relatively quick decision, concerning further operations of the controlled process. The outcome of the decision can be optimal if it is taken cooperatively by a group of experts after careful assessing the risk of future hazards, taking into account the depletion of resources caused by taken actions. For taking such decision, an integrated environment is needed; in which geographically dispersed experts could cooperatively test various control scenarios. In this paper the example of a vital process is presented, i.e. an industrial wastewater treatment plant, where a sudden increase in the content of toxic substances in the inlet flow is the considered hazard. The proposed solution for the cooperative environment is an agent-based framework, which supports the full integration of the JADE environment with the numerical data acquired by OPC from industry-grade instrumentation.