An agent-based framework for petroleum information services from distributed heterogeneous data resources

For making good decisions in the area of petroleum production, it is becoming a big problem how to timely gather sufficient and correct information, which may be stored in databases, data files, or on the World Wide Web. In this paper, Gaia methodology and Open Agent Architecture were employed to contribute a framework to solve above problem. The framework consists of three levels, namely, role mode, agent type, and agent instance. The model with five roles is analyzed. Four agent types are designed Six agent instances are developed for constructing the system of petroleum information services. The experimental results show that all agents in the system can work cooperatively to organize and retrieve relevant petroleum information. The successful implementation of the framework shows that agent-based technology can significantly facilitate the construction of complex systems in distributed heterogeneous data resource environment.