Toward A Practical Multi-agent System for Integrated Control and Asset Management of Petroleum Production Facilities

This paper addresses a practical intelligent multi-agent system for asset management for the petroleum industry, which is crucial for profitable oil and gas facilities operations and maintenance. A research project was initiated to study the feasibility of an intelligent asset management system. Having proposed a conceptual model, architecture, and implementation plan for such a system in previous work [1], [2], [3], we define the autonomy, communications, and artificial intelligence (AI) requirements of the component agents of such a system. We also discuss the software implementation of such agents. Furthermore, we describe a simple system prototype, and conduct a real time simulation experiment to analyze the prototype performance. Simulation results reveal that MATLAB can be used to build high performance real-time multi-agent systems, which can be used for many applications.