Development of a multi-agent information management system for Iran power industry. A case study

A distributed information management system has been developed to integrate and manipulate the heterogeneous, distributed information resources in Iran Power Industry. Multi-agent approach has been used to model numerous users and different information resources as autonomous components, which can interact and exchange information in a virtual environment. The primary focus of the work demonstrates the effective use of this approach to overcome the difficulties associated with decision making in such a large-scale, spread informational environment as the national-wide power industry. Data items of various types stored in physically distributed locations could be retrieved, integrated and displayed to user by a single query. Using an automatically constructed semantic net improves the usability of the answers returned by the system. Robustness, scalability and adaptability are the valuable characteristics gained using this approach.