Multi-agent information system for the assistance to urban mobility

According to the exponential growth of services available on large distributed networks, transport customers require relevant, interactive and instantaneous information during their travels. Thus, we designed and implemented a multi-agent information system using a special kind of software agents: the Mobile Agents. This work belongs to the national French project VIATIC.MOBILITE from the industrial cluster I-trans, which is an initiative bringing together major French players in rail technology and innovative transport systems. The proposed system uses a two-level optimization approach based on metaheuristics. However, some network errors can occur during the mobile agents moving through the distant network nodes (bottleneck, failure, crash...). In this paper, we define a mobile agent negotiation process to reassign required services to available network nodes according to their current states in their correspondent final routes called Workplans. Consequently, we designed and implemented a flexible transport ontology which allows an easy handling of the terms and messages for negotiating. Key-Words: Multi-agent system, Mobile agents, Negotiation protocol, Ontology. * http://www.i-trans.org/