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.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.