Designing Multiagent Decision Support Systems for Traffic Management

Abstract

Modern Decision Support Systems (DSS) not only store large amounts of decision-relevant data, but also aim at assisting decision-makers in exploring the meaning of that data, so as to take decisions based on understanding. To this end, a distributed approach to the construction of DSS has become popular: decision-support agents are responsible for parts of the decision-making process in a (semi-)autonomous (individually) rational fashion. However, despite the advances in the field of agent-oriented software engineering, a principled approach to the design of multiagent systems for decision support is still to come. In this paper, we outline design guidelines for the construction of agent-based DSS. In particular, setting out from an organisational model of decision support environments, we present an abstract architecture for multiagent DSS. We then show how this architecture can be instantiated to a particular real-world domain, traffic management, in a principled fashion and discuss the lessons learnt from this enterprise.