Real time applications to control industrial, medical, scientific, consumer, environmental and other processes is rapidly growing. Today such systems can be found in nuclear power stations, computer-controlled chemical plants, flight control, etc. This growth, however, has also brought to the forefront some of problems with the existing technologies. In domains like real-time alarm processing in a power system control centre existing technologies like expert systems cannot efficiently cope with. These problems have pushed for research into new techniques which could be used for solving these problems. The problems range from among other aspects, the enormous size of the power system and the fast response time constraints in emergency situations. In this paper we describe the application of the Intelligent Multi-Agent Hybrid Distributed Architecture for real-time alarm processing in a power system control centre. We show how the IMAHDA architecture is able to model the complexity and size of the power system as well as meet the desired response time constraints. Implementation of a large scale real time system like alarm processing involves realization of various objectives. These include methodology related objectives, domain related objectives, and management related objectives. This paper also describes the realization of these objectives.
