Supervision system requires not only a high-speed system, but also high reliability (i.e. fault-tolerant systems), high flexibility (generic design) and high scalability (distributed design). Industrial applications have revealed these absolute needs that distinguish modern architectures from the classical ones. Combining top-level Research from three fields - automation, distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) and distributed computer science, a supervision architecture is designed that fits all these criteria. Automation provided a functional description of the smart instruments, DAI, the modularity of multi-agents systems, and distributed database technologies, a reliable protocol for transactional processing.