Multi-agent neural business control system

Small to medium sized companies require a business control mechanism in order to monitor their modus operandi and analyse whether they are achieving their goals. A tool for the decision support process was developed based on a multi-agent system that incorporates a case-based reasoning system and automates the business control process. The case-based reasoning system automates the organization of cases and the retrieval stage by means of a Maximum Likelihood Hebbian Learning-based method, an extension of the Principal Component Analysis which groups similar cases by automatically identifying clusters in a data set in an unsupervised mode. The multi-agent system was tested with 22 small and medium sized companies in the textile sector located in the northwest of Spain during 29 months, and the results obtained have been very satisfactory

A forecasting solution to the oil spill problem based on a hybrid intelligent system

Oil spills represent one of the most destructive environmental disasters. Predicting the possibility of finding oil slicks in a certain area after an oil spill can be critical in reducing environmental risks. The system presented here uses the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) methodology to forecast the presence or absence of oil slicks in certain open sea areas after an oil spill. CBR is a computational methodology designed to generate solutions to certain problems by analysing previous solutions given to previously solved problems. The proposed CBR system includes a novel network for data classification and retrieval. This type of network, which is constructed by using an algorithm to summarize the results of an ensemble of Self-Organizing Maps, is explained and analysed in the present study. The Weighted Voting Superposition (WeVoS) algorithm mainly aims to achieve the best topographically ordered representation of a dataset in the map. This study shows how the proposed system, called WeVoS-CBR, uses information such as salinity, temperature, pressure, number and area of the slicks, obtained from various satellites to accurately predict the presence of oil slicks in the north-west of the Galician coast, using historical data