Paper acceptcd for presentation a t PPT 2001 2001 IEEE Porto Power T e c h Conference 1Olh -1 3Ih September, Porto,

Portugal

Development of a Multi-agent Information Management System for Iran Power Industry ACase Study
C. Lucus, M A. Zia, A 4 . R. A. Shiruzi, A. Alishahi

Abstract-- 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.
Index

This paper aims to report the implementation of agent-based information system for the Iran power industry. There are many high-volume and distributed information resources within the Iran Power Industry, which are mainly managed in different formats and strategies. These include documents related to power plants, maintenance manuals, Power distribution network statistics, logistics and workforce, and power production information. Additionally, there is a largescale technical library with various types of library resources. On the hand, there are users with different needs and skills, like power industry strategic managers, operational managers, power engineers, and technicians that need to access and use these information resources for their decision makings and operational activities (network planning, workforce scheduling and management, repair, maintenance, etc.). A distributed information management system has been developed to integrate and manipulate these heterogeneous, distributed information resources. 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' The agents gather, filter, and analyze the available information, mine the strategic data and discover the invisible strategic knowledge in power industry information resources and provide the needed information according to the level and need of the stakeholders of the system. In this paper an experiment on the application of this methodology for implementing a distributed information system is reported' This system has been for Iran Ministry of Energy (and ipecifically'Tavanir Co.). The main objective is to provide a uniform and easy to use

Terms-Internet

Programming,

Power

System,

Information Management, Multi-agent Distributed Information Management.

Environment,

I. INTRODUCTION

D M I D increase in the amount of information generated

industry and related logistic branches, has resulted in an extensive need for efficient and easy-to-use information management systems. On the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence provide the information management systems with a wide range of intelligent decision-making techniques. Decision- making can thus be based not only upon raw data, but also upon useful knowledge extracted from the data through analysis of the underlying trends and patters. Furthermore, recent development in Internet technology, and rapid dissemination of easy-to-implement and use tools for data analysis, interchange,. and publishing have facilitated the development a proper infrastructure for experimenting the distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) technology in industry. Intelligent Agent Interaction environments as realization of such a technology, has been a focal point of attention during the recent years.
This work was supported in pad by the Iran Ministry of EnerW and School of Intelligent Systesm, P M , Tehran, Iran. Car0 Lucas. Mohammad Amin Zia. and Afra Alishahi is with School of Mathematics, Tehran, Iran. (e-mail: amin@ipm.ac.ir). Mohammad Reza Ayatollah-zadeh Shirazi is currently with Amir-Kabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

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0-7803-7139-9/01/$10.00 0200 1 IEEE

retrieval system, which covers some heterogeneous, nonuniform information systems. The scope of the information covered by the system includes technical, financial, library, and statistical data in Iran power industry. Furthermore, Internet as a valuable source of information is considered to be a part of resources that is covered by the systems. Therefore, a unified industry information system has been developed based on four heterogeneous resources; namely, Tavanir Statistical Information System, Tavanir Technical Document Center, Iran Power Industry Library, and Internet. Based on the knowledge queried and retrieved from the system, strategic decision could be made easily. There is also a statistical analysis tools, which could be used to generate statistical analysis on the fly. The uniformity in querying and presenting the retrieved information, in addition, has beTn implemented so as to satisfy the different type of needs from probable range of system users, e.g. strategic managers, technical managers, technicians, financial officers, and librarians. In Section I1 further look at the specific problem domain is given. In this section the need for the design of a multiagent environment architecture for the problem is explained. Section I11 is devoted to a brief explanation of a multi-agent environment architecture that constitutes the base of our approach in the system design. The application of such an approach for the given problem is discussed then in this section. Finally, in Section IV, a case study of the approach. in Iran Power Industry is introduced and implementation details are given.

implemented reports is rigidly defined and it is not possible for managers to analyze the data on the fly. The third resource, which was to be included in the unified system is the Power industry library. The library is also mechanized by a non-standard library automation system, which does not support the web-connectivity and is not working in clientlservermode.

MPROACH 111. MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

In this section the theoretical basis for our approach to the design of a distributed information system is introduced. In the first part, an agent as the main building block of a multiagent system (MAS) is defined. The second part devotes to an introduction to a multi-agent system, and in the final part the application of MAS approach to our specific problem is explained. A. Agent As we use the term "agent" in our discussions, it is better to present a brief definition of this term. Researchers have offered a variety of definitions for agents. In the following, we mention two of them:
a- Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out f operations on behalf o f a user or another some set o program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representation o f the user's goals or desires [2]. b- Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex dynamic environment, sense and act autonomousl) in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or t a s h for which they are designed [3].

11. IRAN MINISTRY OF ENERGY AND POWER INFORMATION MANAGEMENT Iran Ministry of Energy (IME) in general and Tavanir Co. as the main supervisor on the IME activities in particular, are faced to a big challenge to unify the user interface to the different type of information that is already exists or produced continuously. There are many information producing centers including power generation stations, dispatching centers, transmission line stations, power utility stations, man-power offices, technical document data warehouses, and statistical information bases. In addition, there are other sources of information that are ought to be included to a uniform information system such as technical libraries and Internet. Meanwhile, some separate projects have been established to manage some resources of interests, which are not standard in the sense of current Internet-based systems and should be included in the uniform system. As the first example for a system that must be covered by the uniform information management systems, a system was developed to manage a huge number of digitized technical documents of nation-wide generation, distribution, dispatching, and station offices.

In an information environment, we can see that software agents act on behalf of their users to perform informationprocessing tasks. These tasks can be locating and accessing information from various sources, resolving inconsistencies in the retrieved information, filtering the information, integrating information from heterogeneous information sources and customizing them to the users' information needs. Another way of looking at the agents is to consider their characteristics, such as Autonomy, Collaboration, Goal orientation, Self-starting, Adaptability, and Social ability [ 5 , 1,6, 81:

Agents can be used for information management, process control, workflow management, network management, training, collaborative production, electronic commerce, adaptive user interface, and electronic mail and messaging. As another example, there was another information A single agent with general knowledge that performs a wide management system, which was used to collect all the range of tasks on behalf of its user has several limitations. statistical data of power production of nation-wide stations For example, this needs a very broad knowledge to cover a and offices. This system that was implemented in the variety of tasks and also it becomes a single point of failure National Dispatching Center provides the industry managers in the system. In the next section, we will define multi-agent with a set of predefined reports in different subjects of systems and we describe how and why we use this approach interest. The systems, however, is implemented by for designing our system. conventional classic methods that could not be accessed via Internet-based systems. In addition, the set of pre-

B. The Approach In designing an information management framework for the required domain in power industry we used multi-agent system technology. In this section we give a brief description of MASs and why we use this technology in designing systems. Multi-agent systems is the sub-field of Distributed Artificial Intelligent (DAI) that aims to provide principles for construction of complex systems involving multiple agents and mechanisms for coordination of independent agents' behavior (the way agent acts). In other words, this file considers how these agents coordinate their goals, skills, and plans for doing actions or solving problems. Multi-agent systems have various applications such as providing integrated access to information in open environments, integrated manufacturing, transport planning, and telecomm management [1,5,8]. In using any type of technology for designing systems, we are faced with two questions:

C. Application o f Multi-agent Systems Approach to the Design of a Distributed Information Management System
By studying our selected domain in the power industry, we found the following characteristics and dealed with them by using MAS:
*'Distributedinformation sources. As mentioned earlier, one of the resources under consideration are the documents in the Power Industry Document Center, which includes technical documents for various power plants, transmission and distribution networks etc. Part of this information resource is located in Tavanir Document Center and other parts are located in the other document centers. Also, we have had a total system for gathering statistical data from all part of Iran power industry and generating appropriate reports. A Library system that contains all kind of information about the books, journals, and technical reports related to the power industry is also another information resource we should consider in our integrated system.

* In what circumstances is it useful?

* What are its advantages over the other technologies?

Researchers in this field [4, 6, 81 believe that the most important reason to use MAS in designing a system is that some domains require it. If there are different users or organizations with different goals and proprietary information, such as the case we had in our case study, then we can use a multi-agent system to handle the existing interactions. Multi-agent systems provide a method for parallel computation and this feature can speed up a system's operation. In our domain we assigned several independent tasks or abilities such as managing different information resources and interacting with user by separate agents.
Robustness is another benefit of MAS. If control and responsibilities are sufficiently shared among different agents the system can tolerate failures by one of the agents.

* Heterogeneity. Our environment has components that are heterogeneous. This heterogeneity is in underlying database management systems, communication protocols, query languages, semantics associated with the information stored and manipulated. Agents in our MAS create a layer that was semantically consistent and syntactically uniform. In this layer, agents communicate with common protocols and by doing this they can solve many heterogeneity. Also, autonomy of individual systems (a desirable feature that we want to preserve while performing logical integration) will retain. * Legacy based components. We were faced with many systems that were developed prior to implementation of our . system. We needed to update these systems so that they can share their information in our system. We chose a standard approach of constructing agent wrapper around these existing systems. These agents interface to the information sources and users to provide a uniform way of accessing the data. By doing this we need a very little change in internal data structure and updating legacy information sources.
In conclusion, we can say that this multi-agent layer builds an intermediate layer and semantic service and connects information sources to application programs and users (a new approach that has been proposed of designing modem information systems). The goal of cooperating agents is providing integrated information without integrating information sources and removing their autonomy. T-MAIS IV. CASESTUDY: T-MAIS, or Tavanir Multi Agent Information System, has been developed by Digital Library Research Group in School of Intelligent Systems to satisfy information needs of power industry managers of Iran. In the following subsections, we will describe the requirement analysis and specification of the power industry of Iran, and design and implementation of T-MAIS in brief detail.

Also, MASs are scalable. Multi-agent systems are inherently modular; it is much easier to add new agents to a MAS than it is to add new capabilities to a monolithic systems. In our requirement specification we found that capabilities and parameters of the involved systems need to change over time and we need to add new systems and services or delete old systems. We believe that this benefit of MASs wills satisfy this requirement.
As we mentioned earlier, MASs are modular. This modularity can lead to simpler programming from a programmer's perspective. Rather than performing the whole task with a centralized agent, programmers can identify subtasks and assign control of those subtasks to different agents. In next section, We will see requirements of our study domain and how we take advantage of using multi-agent systems for providing global access to, and better management of information in the field of power industry.

A. Design of T - M I S
In the previous section, we described the characteristics of the distributed and heterogeneous information resources, which construct the whole structure of the information space of, power industry. According to these characteristics and requirements, use of multi-agent systems is a suitable approach for designing and implementing an information management system for power industry. With multi-agent architecture, four main properties, means modularity, distributed processing, abstraction and intelligence are gained. These properties are essential for an information system with the pre-defined requirements and characteristics. In this approach, the multi-agent system is considered as an interface between users, applications and information resources. Such an environment provides also an intermediate layer that connects information resources to applications. The goal of the Cooperating agents of the system is to provide integrated information without the need to integrate the information resources and limit their autonomy. These agents must perform the following tasks to achieve this goal: 0 Retrieving relevant data from several heterogeneous data sources. 0 Coding the local knowledge related to under management information resources. Integrating retrieved information. 0 Reducing the integrated information via abstraction in order to increase the relevance of search results to users needs.
B. System Architecture T-h4AIS is a multi-agent system and its main goal is to integrate and cover the various heterogeneous data collections and information resources in the environment and provide appropriate information services. As shown in Figure 1, an agent is assigned to each object of the system, resources and users. Coordinator agent does coordinating and establishing connections between agents. Main characteristics and tasks of each agent are described in the next section.

Four resource manager agents exist in T-MAIS, corresponding to statistical report generator system, technical documents center, library, and Internet.
Interface Agents. These agents accept users queries and send them to the coordinator agent. Representation of the retrieved results to users is also their duty. These agents may have a model for each user containing their preferences and information needs, and use them to increase the intelligence of interpretation of the user queries. Coordinator Agent. This agent is related to interface agents to accept their requests and send them to proper resource manager agents. In addition, management of data flow in the whole system and establishing connections between agents is the coordinator agents responsibility. This agents goal is to optimize information retrieval from resources, by conducting users requests in system in a suitable way. Coordinator agent performs its tasks by three separated modules: Indexer Robot. This module collects the keywords of information resources and integrates them. This module through fast indexing techniques does retrieval of existing concepts. Construct and management of semantic net is also done by indexer robot.

Search Engine. This module gets the interpreted queries and searches on information resources. It must be considered that connecting with each information resource is done via its correspond resource manager agent. Therefore, the duty of search engine is to manage the parallel search on different resources and integrate the results. Agent Manager. This module keeps all the information about agents of the system in a database and if any change occurs, updates related fields. This module also does introducing an interface agent to a resource manager agent.

C. Design of Agents Each agent is a non-terminated process, which has a number of specific tasks and can interact with other agents autonomously or with the aid of coordinator agent. Properties and tasks of each family of agents are described below.
0

Resource Manager Agents. These agents are managing a specific data source or information resource, and can offer its information services to other demander agents. Resource manager agents are responsible to identify the correspond resource and communicate with, perform local searches in, and retrieve relevant information from it, in order to offer them to the coordinator or interface agents.

D. Internet Sub-system Internet is a huge source of information with no directory. There are some general-purpose resource discovery software systems, i.e. Search and Meta-search Engines, by which information related to different topics could be found and retrieved. However, working with these engines needs a type of expertise in using different query languages. In addition, due to extensive changes in Internet characteristics, there are always a big amount of garbage and useless information retrieved by these engines. The Internet sub-system is, therefore, designed and implemented not only to overcome these problems but also to provide a local indexed repository of discovered resources from Internet. This local repository contains a kind of mirror to Internet data related to the field of power engineering. Also a local index database, which expedite exhaustive search processes through the discovered information.

The main part of the systems consists of a software robot, which initiates off-line searches through the Internet, purifies the results, and updates the HTML mirror database. The engines considered here are Yahoo, Metacrawler, Excite, Infoseek, and Altavista. Keyword file contains a list of phrases related to the field of power engineering, which are adopted from INSPEC category classes. The phrases of the list are dispatched by the software robot to a number of search and meta-search engines, while the system is in offline mode. The results from these searches, which are HTML files containing the pointers to related resources, are filtered to delete the multiple occurred pointers. Then the validity of pointers are checked to see whether the corresponding resource still exists and relates to the subject of power engineering. In the final stage the HTML mirror database is updated which contains the first pages of the discovered Internet resources. This database, however, is indexed by an indexing agent to form a local index of stored HTML pages that will be used by the system search engine. The local search engine, also, use the local index to provide the system central agent or users themselves a fast search through the discovered resources from Internet. Therefore, as a search query reaches from the central agent or user, a local search is initiated by the search engine through the index database. The result that is a list of pointers to local resources will be sent to the requesting agent. The user, in the final step, will retrieve the selected resource from the local mirror database. E. Data Flow in System According to the used architecture, the work-flow in system is as follows:
An interface agent accepts a query from a user. This query is a logical combination of concepts or keywords. If interface agent has seen a similar request before or owns enough information in users model to determine appropriate information resources, it can interact with the resource manager agents directly, and gain its desired information. If user has specified a certain resource to search in, this manner is still appropriate. Otherwise, interface agent translates users query to a standard form and sends it to coordinator agent.

. .

Concept is too general, so a group of searchable concepts or keywords will be extracted by interacting with user and displaying more specific concepts related to initial one. Concept is low-valued, so a list of related concepts is displayed to user to choose one or a group of them.

Finally, a list of searchable concepts are achieved, each belongs to one or more information resources. A request is sent to them. Retrieved information by resource manager agents are integrated and displayed to user. Transactions and responses of user to retrieved information are sensed and recorded in the system. F. Implementation The widespread use of information networks has caused general attention to standard communication protocols, especially HTTP protocol, which is used in World Wide Web network. For this reason, T-MAIS is implemented so that the users can access its features through a web client, and even remotely by dialing a web server. Coordinator agent and resource manager agents are active processes on a web server, listening to their special ports to answer incoming requests. Whenever a user connects to server, an interface agent invokes and activates. Java programming language, because of its portability, platform independence, and network and web programming capabilities implements coordinator and interface agents. Coordinator agent is a Java application, but interface agents are Java applets. Resource manager agents are implemented in different styles because of their different structure of resources and services. Major techniques used to implement resource manager agents are well-known CGI programming techniques, Microsoft Internet Database Connector (IDC), ActiveX technology, and ChartFX Internet Edition.
V. CONCLUSION
A distributed information management system has been

Coordinator agent refers to the database of historical events. If there exists useful information to help interpret the received request, it is interpreted and converted to a suitable form (or may be converted to a number of requests), and is sent to proper resources. Otherwise, agent must interpret the request with the aid of the global semantic net. If users desired concept exists in semantic net, the following situations may occur: Concept has a high information quantity, so coordinator agent will send a request to resources containing the concept.

developed to integrate and manipulate the heterogeneous, distributed information resources of the power ministry of Iran. 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. There are, moreover, other aspects of the project still under the development for further improvements of the system. There are other agents like Planner, Forecaster, Scheduler and Data Miner will be added to the T-MAIS in future research. The strategy presented in this paper could be applied to a broad class of wide area information systems, especially with unstructured, non-harmonized resources. Using Web as the main platform of such systems could make them more accessible to a variety of users.

VI. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was done by the Digital Library Team at the School of Intelligent Systems directed by Professor Car0 Lucas. We would like to thank all the researchers helped us for completing the project especially Mr. Ali Tabesh who is currently a PhD candidate in University of Arizona, Mr. Alirezai Montazerolghaem, Ms. Shadi Farbood, Ms. Jeyran Hezavei, and Ms. Mehrnaz Arian. This work was partially supported by Iran Minstry of Energy, Tavanir Co. We wish to thank Mr. Sharikdeh, Mr. Zamani, and Mr. Tahani fiom Tavanr Co. for their contiques helps and valuable contributions to this project. We would like also to express our great respect for all her helps and support to Ms. Shahin Khalilpour.
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[3] Pattie Maes, Artificial Life Meets Entertainment: Life like Autonomous Agent, Communicationsof the ACM, Vol. 38, and No 11,1995. [4] Stone P. and Veloso M., Multi-agent System: A Surveyfrom Machine Learning Perspective, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, Under review for journal publication, February 1997. . , Intelligent agents: Theory [5] Wooldrige M. J., Jennings N. R and Practice, Knowledge Engineering Review, 10(2), 1995. [6] Weiss G., Multi-agent Systems,MIT Press, 1999. [7] Wagner G., Towards Agent-Oriented Information Systems, Institute Fur Informatik, Freie Universitat Berlin, Jan 2000. [SI Jernnings RN., Sycara K., Wooldridge A., A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development, Autonomous Agents and MulitAgent Systems, 1,275-306,1998.

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Fig. 1.