Integration with Ontologies

One of today’s hottest IT topics is integration, as bringing together information from different sources and structures is not completely solved. The approach outlined here wants to illustrate how ontologies [Gr93] could help to support the integration process

Developing Industrial Multi-Agent Systems (Invited Paper)

The development and deployment of multi-agent systems in real world settings raises a number of important research issues and problems which must be overcome if Distributed AI (DAI) is to become a widespread solution technology. Work undertaken in the context of the ARCHON project has provided a number of important insights into these issues. By providing an in depth analysis of ARCHON’s electricity transportation management application, this paper draws together many of the experiences obtained when building one of the world's first operational DAI systems

GRATE: A General Framework for Cooperative Problem Solving

As the deployment of expert systems has spread into more complex and sophisticated environments, so inherent technological limitations have been observed. As a technique for overcoming this complexity barrier, researchers have started to build systems composed of multiple, cooperating components. These systems tend to fall into two distinct categories: systems which solve a particular problem, such as speech recognition or vehicle monitoring, and systems which are general to some extent. GRATE is a general framework which enables an application builder to construct multi-agent systems for the domain of industrial process control. Unlike other cooperation frameworks, GRATE embodies a significant amount of inbuilt knowledge related to cooperation and control which can be utilised during system building. This approach offers a paradigm shift for the construction of multi-agent systems in which the role of configuring preexisting knowledge becomes an integral component. Rather than starting from scratch the designer can utilise the inbuilt knowledge and augment it, if necessary, with domain specific information. The GRATE architecture has a clear separation of concerns and has been applied to real-world problems in the domains of electricity transportation management and diagnosis of a particle accelerator beam controller

DISTRIBUTED GENERATION BUSINESS MODELLING. BUSMOD PROJECT

Currently, the electric industry is undergoing a complete transformation and restructuring due to the concurrent convergence of deregulation and the advent of Distributed Generation (DG). Some years ago, electricity was produced in some big power plants and a few vertically integrated electric utilities covered all the steps in the electricity supply: generation, transmission, distribution and supply