Integrating agents into cooperative intelligent decision support systems

In this paper, we propose to integrate agents in a cooperative intelligent decision support system. The resulting system, ACIDS (Agent-based Cooperative Intelligent Decision-support System) is a decision support system designed to support operators during contingencies by giving them detailed, real-time information, allowing them to integrate and interpret it and then transmit and monitor their decisions through the chain of incident command. During the contingency, the operator using the ACIDS should be able to: gather information about the incident location; access databases related to the incident; activate predictive modelling programs; support analyses of the operator, and monitor the progress of the situation and action execution. The decision making process, applied to the boilers management system, relies in ACIDS on a cycle that includes recognition of the causes of a fault (diagnosis), plan actions to solve the incidences and, execution of the selected actions.