Abstract

An industrial control system uses a number of autonomous control units, each associated with one piece of equipment in an industrial process. The autonomous control units negotiate by bidding among themselves to determine a common set of input and output values for the interconnected machines with which they are associated. Each autonomous control unit determines whether input values are acceptable by using a model of its associated equipment. The model provides anticipated output values based on given input values and is effectively operated in reverse for external counterbids proposing output values and needing to know input values, or internal counterbids seeking to optimize counterbid input values against output based goals. The reverse modeling iteratively applies inputs to the model until the desired output is attained. The inputs may be constrained by predefined intermediate constraints and may be changed in a binary search pattern. In multi-input models, one input may be specified for iteration.