A Multiagent System Applied to the Design of Petroleum Off-Shore Platforms

This paper presents a model for cooperative multi-agents that interact in a closed environment, i.e., an environment where the rules are well known by the agents and do not change dynamically. In a computational environment where several different software agents share resources to reach their goals, the occurrence of conflicts is inevitable. Therefore it is of highest importance to have an efficient mechanism to solve such conflicts. While other models in the literature present solutions for conflict resolution based on centralized and distributed algorithms, our proposal is to solve the conflicts in a hierarchical manner. The proposed model is based on the application of Social Laws and it was inspired by the theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, being denominated Tri-Coord Model, that is, of Triple Coordination. We implemented a prototype based on the Tri-Coord Model, and applied to the task of oil and gas process floorplan design in a petroleum off-shore platform. In that domain the project is divided in several subsystems, with an agent being responsible for each sub-system. Our experiments indicate that the Tri-Coord Model can indeed yield a better performance in the development of a project. First, because it decreases the interruptions for accomplishment of meetings to solve conflicts related to customization of sub-system’s parameters. Second, because it removes the bottleneck associated to a centralized model for conflict resolution. Third, because through the regulator environment of Tri-Coord the agents behavior can be controlled implicitly by the environment. In that way the agents learn how to interact correctly and the independence between the environment and the agents turns the system more flexible.