Recent developments and future trends of industrial agents

The agent technology provides a new way to design and engineer control solutions based on the decentralization of control over distributed structures, addressing the current requirements for modern control systems in industrial domains. This paper presents the current situation of the development and deployment of agent technology, discussing the initiatives and the current trends faced for a wider dissemination and industrial adoption, based on the work that is being carried out by the IEEE IES Technical Committee on Industrial Agents

Recovering from airline operational problems with a multi-agent system: a case study

The Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) tries to solve unexpected problems during the airline operation. Problems with aircraft, crewmembers and passengers are common and very hard to solve due to the several variables involved. This paper presents the implementation of a real-world multi-agent system for operations recovery in an airline company. The analysis and design of the system was done following a GAIA based methodology. We present the system specification as well as the implementation using JADE. A case study is included, where we present how the system solved a real problem

An intelligent interface agent for an airline company web portal

In this paper we introduce an implementation of an Intelligent Interface Agent to support the use of a web portal in an airline company. The interface agent architecture and data model is presented. We formalized concepts such as relevance and proximity regarding the data structure. The concepts of personal opinion and general opinion are also introduced and formalized. A statistical analysis was performed to obtain the best value when processing the general opinion. Some results of that analysis are presented and we conclude discussing our work and presenting future improvements

Disruption Management in Airline Operations Control – An Intelligent Agent-Based Approach

Operations control is one of the most important areas for an airline company. Through operations control mechanisms an airline company monitors all the flights checking if they follow the schedule that was previously defined by other areas of the company. Unfortunately, some problems may arise during this stage (Clausen et al., 2005). Those problems can be related with crewmembers, aircrafts and passengers. The Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) includes teams of experts specialized in solving the above problems under the supervision of an operation control manager. Each team has a specific goal contributing to the common and general goal of having the airline operation running under as few problems as possible. The process of solving these kinds of problems is known as Disruption Management (Kohl et al., 2004) or Operations Recovery

Quantifying quality operational costs in a multi-agent system for airline operations recovery

When recovering from operational problems, the Airline Operations Control Centre (AOCC) usually tries to minimize direct operational costs while satisfying all the required rules. In this paper we present the implementation of a Distributed Multi-Agent System (MAS) representing the existing real-life roles in an AOCC. This MAS includes software agents that cooperate through a distributed problem solving approach, to find the best solution for each problem. We propose a general approach to quantify quality operational costs, so that passengers' satisfaction can also be considered in the final decision. We present a real case study to introduce our approach to quantify the quality operational costs and solve several real unexpected crew problems. We show that our MAS with quality costs is able to reduce flight delays and increase passenger satisfaction without increasing significantly the direct operational costs. A comparison with two other methods is presented. Copyright © 2009 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved

The rationale behind the development of an airline operations control centre using Gaia-based methodology

In this paper, we report how we complemented Gaia methodology to analyse and design a multi-agent system for an airline company operations control centre. Besides showing the rationale behind the analysis, design and implementation of our system, we also present how we mapped the abstractions used in agent-oriented design to specific constructs in JADE. The advantages of using a goal-oriented early requirements analysis and its influence on subsequent phases of analysis and design are also presented. Finally, we also propose UML 2.0 diagrams at several different levels for the representation of Gaia deliverables, such as organisational structure, role and interaction model, and agent and service model. © 2008, Inderscience Publishers