MADARP: A Flexible Agent Architecture for Passenger Transportation

This work describes the development of a distributed agentbased application devoted to the flexible transportation of passengers. The system considers the planning and control of trip requests comming from clients. The underlying 3-tier agent architecture, named MADARP, provides a set of base agents organized around an interface, a planning and a service layer. Interface agents provide GUIs for the interaction with customers and drivers, while planning agents make use of a distributed version of an improved insertion heuristic called ADARTW for the scheduling of passengers’ trips. They make use of the contract-net protocol as base coordination mechanism plus a specific transportation domain&communication ontology. The agent application was designed with the agent-oriented software engineering methodology (AOSE) PASSI and implemented over the JADE agent platform. Performance tests were carried out, to evaluate the application’s planning capabilities, by analyzing diverse clients’ arrival rates while varying the number of hosts.