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

Abstract

Abstract: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. Keywords: multi-agent systems; agent-oriented methodologies; goal-oriented requirements analysis; operations recovery; disruption management.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Castro, A. and Oliveira, E. (2008) 'The rationale behind the development of an airline operations control centre using Gaia-based methodology', Int. J. Vol. 2, No. 3, Biographical notes: António Castro is a Software Engineer at TAP Portugal, the Portuguese airline company, where he manages software projects related to crew scheduling and operations control. He is currently a PhD student of Informatics Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto. His current research interests include multi-agent systems, agent-oriented software engineering and distributed systems. The rationale behind the development of an airline OCC 351Eugénio Oliveira is a Full Professor at the University of Porto, Portugal. He coordinates a research group on distributed artificial intelligence in the LIACC Lab and a doctoral programme in informatics. He obtained his PhD in Knowledge Engineering/Logic Programming from the Universidade Nova in Lisbon (1984). He was Guest Academic at IBM/IEC, Belgium (1984Belgium ( -1985. He was awarded the Gulbenkian Prize in 1983. He has participated in European and nationally funded projects involving intelligent agents. Agent-based frameworks for B2B, multi-agent learning and agent-based teamwork are current topics of interest. He has published a number of papers in journals and proceedings.

Using Quality Costs in a Multi-Agent System for an Airline Operations Control

“…We start from this approach and make the necessary changes on the specialized agents and in the multi-criteria algorithm, so that the quality costs are included. For those interested in agent-oriented methodologies and in how this MAS was developed, please read (Castro and Oliveira, 2008).…”

Recent Developments and Future Trends of Industrial Agents

“…LIACC (Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory) together with the Portuguese airline TAP are developing the MASDIMA (Multi Agent System for Disruption Management) project, by implementing a multi agent system that monitors and solves problems during the execution of the airline operation, being able to find the best integrated solution after a disruption has occurred [35].…”

A Multi-Agent System for Airline Operations Control

“…The development followed the methodology presented in [5]. Some of the Agent/MAS characteristics that make us adopt this paradigm are the following [12]: Autonomy: MAS models problems in terms of autonomous interacting component-agents, which are a more natural way of representing task allocation, team planning, and user preferences, among others.…”

“…Architecture and Specialized Agents: The MAS sub-organizations have their own architecture with their specialized agents. Figure 3 shows the architecture for Crew Recovery in a UML diagram according to the notation expressed in [5]. The architecture for Aircraft Recovery and Pax Recovery are very similar.…”