Affiliations: [a] AI Group, University Rey Juan Carlos, Campus de Móstoles s/n, E-28933 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] | [b] agents@city Group, City University, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author.
Abstract: Decision Support Systems provide assistance to humans involved in complex decision-making processes. They are particularly relevant in domains where human operators have to take operational decisions regarding the management of complex industrial or environmental processes. In these applications, Decision-support agents are responsible for parts of the decision-making process in a (semi-)autonomous (individually) rational fashion: they collect and facilitate decision relevant data, but also provide advanced reasoning services to analyse the meaning of this information, and make it available to the decision-maker in the course of flexible, semantically rich dialogues. Next-generation agent-based DSS aim at an open architecture to allow for a dynamic integration of more and better decision support services. In this article, we present a multiagent service architecture as a first step towards this goal. Our approach draws upon the latest FIPA specifications for agent and service interoperability. By mapping FIPA key abstractions – its agent communication language, directory service and, in particular, its service description model – to the requirements of agent-based Decision Support Systems, we identify potential shortcomings, and show how they can be overcome. We illustrate our approach in the domain of bus fleet management.
