A Methodology for Agent-Oriented Systems Development Applied in Oil Industry

Nowadays, the oil and gas industry faces a rapid evolution which involves the use of a wide specialized software based capabilities to achieve its business targets. Software and information technology represent the framework for a variety of business processes such as exploration, well construction, production optimization and operations. Complex oil and gas facilities gather key engineering and related disciplines needed to analyze, desi gn, engineer, and operate the facility across its entire lifecycle. A solution that is emerging today to assist the processes developed within an industrial plant (e.g. gas-oil separation plant) is represented by intelligent agents. Due to their capabilities (reactivity, social ability, mobility, veracity, rationality, and learning/adaptation) agents can successful work together to solve complex and distributed problems associated to production, storing, transport and processing the petroleum products. After a careful analysis of agent-based methodologies, the authors of the current paper have chosen ZEUS methodology for development of a multi-agents system applied in oil industry. The research work consists in: defining of agents, the inter-agent communication, associating the roles of agents, implementing, testing and evaluating the designed multi-agent system.