Multiagent System for Detecting and Solving Design-Time Conflicts in Civil Infrastructure

One typical source of problems in the Civil Infrastructure domain is the distributed and collaborative nature of the projects in which different profiles of engineers contribute with designs devoted to the interest of their field of expertise. Thus, situations in which there are different conflicts of interests are quite common. A conflict refers to a situation in which the actions of an engineer collide with the interests of other engineers. In this paper, we present a multi-agent system that, thanks to the use of ontologies and rules on those ontologies, is able to detect profilespecific conflict situations and solve them according to the preferences of the parties involved in the conflict. The conflict solving is based on the Multi Agent Resource Allocation (MARA) theory. The system is applied to a real use case of an urban development where both the road network and the buildings are designed.