PROSA and delegate MAS for open-air engineering processes

This paper discusses the application of the PROSA reference architecture and its ant-colony-inspired delegate MAS to the coordination of open-air engineering processes such as open-pit mining, road construction and agriculture farming. The execution of such an open-air engineering process by cooperating mobile equipment needs to be carefully planned for its cost effective and timely completion. The dynamics in the open and distributed operating environment of these processes make the planning complex. This paper presents the design of an on-line planning system. The focus of the presented approach is on improving the process visibility to enable better-informed decision making. The on-line planning system based on PROSA is model-driven.; it uses executable models to reflect the operations and to generate short-term forecasts.