Design of a holonic remote monitoring and diagnosis system for fleet management

The main challenges in sensor network based monitoring systems are the control and management of complex modules and elements interacting among them and with the environment. This work presents and validates a design model for monitoring and diagnosis systems based on sensor networks exploiting potentialities of the holonic approach. The holonic structure is designed with the final goal to guarantee the performances and the functionalities required by the application scenario of road and work vehicles rental companies. Actually they are interacting and geographically distributed systems. The capabilities of cooperation among modules, hierarchical organization, modularity and reliability of holonic design are exploited. Diagnosis of monitored events is coded and validated through an ad hoc ontology. The design does not give assumption on the physical architecture of holons but only on their capacities/properties, therefore it can be reused in different physical and hardware resources. The case studies confirm the capability of our design to be quickly transferred to programmers and coded in firmware and software.