Supervisor agent

Coordination of groups of agents is accomplished by Supervisor agents (S, class ASupervisor). They ensure that partial, local solutions to the control problems of a specific domain are integrated into global experiment control. Agents in the hierarchal tree transmit messages between themselves containing commands and status information. Normally, a human operator sends commands to the “grand supervisor” agent, which forwards them to supervisor agents down the tree, who in turn forward them to component agents and so on. The results of the commands are sent back up the tree so that the human operator is made aware of any changes in the state of the system. Any agent in the hierarchy can perform actions on receiving a command and can return the results from that command.