UTILISING MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS TO DEVELOP AN INTELLIGENT MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM BASED ON THE DROOLS-PLANNER

Interest in multi-agent systems (MAS) research has grown in recent years. With this research, new implementation possibilities are being sought on a continuous basis. One potential domain in which MAS could be applied is in the development of an intelligent maintenance management system (IMMS). As with any software development, a methodology is required to design and implement the system. In this paper we describe the development of an IMMS based on MAS using the TROPOS methodology. TROPOS is an agent oriented software engineering (AOSE) methodology for developing multi agent systems. The development process of a multi-agent system using TROPOS consists of a number of phases, and most of these phases of the development process of our system are described in this paper. The development process is supported by an interactive development environment (IDE) software tool. The tool also facilitates automatic code generation in a later phase of the design process leading to the implementation of the agents of our system.