NM-MAS: A Multi-Agent System for Network Management in Oil Industry

In recent years, the oil and gas industry is experiencing a major evolution around the world, thanks to the seemingly insatiable demand for fossil. Operations such as drilling, transporting, storing, refining, and exporting oil and natural gas require a great deal of industrial automation and industrial network (Ethernet solutions) can play an important role. To make a network fault-tolerant requires that the user/company to think how a network device may fail and take steps that help prevent that type of failure. A solution in this case is to use a multi-agent system to assure an optimal function of the network. In this paper, the authors propose an agent-based system named NM-MAS for network management, with application in oil field. The main objective of NM-MAS is to maintain/increase the network performance. This project is presented only in the conceptual form, the implementation and testing phases consisting the future authors' work. The authors propose an evaluation scenario and evaluation indicators for NM-MAS.