Matoura Multi-Agent Tourist Advisor 1993 1 citations ? 0 self

Abstract:  this paper. MaTourA is currently under development by the University of Athens and Expert Systems International in the context of the ESPRIT 6708 APPLAUSE Project (Application & Assessment of Parallel Programming Using Logic). MaTourA has been designed and is currently being implemented in the ElipSys language [2, 9, 4], a parallel constraint logic programming system developed at the European Computer-Industry Research Centre (ECRC). APPLAUSE is a three year project that began in May 1992. The main aim of the project is to assess the advantages (and disadvantages) of the ElipSys language in various application areas, namely planning & scheduling, decision support and multi-agent systems. ElipSys is a pure parallel logic programming system which supports, apart from parallelism, other additional features, such as constraint satisfaction over finite domains, that may be exploited to design and implement applications useful in a real-world environment. The multi-agent systems approach adopted in the case of MaTourA is a major research area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) [3], in which agents of various types and capabilities cooperate in problem solving. MaTourA comprises a set of autonomous agents reflecting the procedures involved in a tourist advisory environment. In order to support the development of MaTourA, ElipSys was extended appropriately with a threelayered socket based communication scheme capable to satisfy the interaction requirements of the MaTourA agents. MaTourA is the evolution of another application, the single-agent PErsonalized Tourist INformation Advisor (PETINA) [12, 13] developed by the University of Athens in the ElipSys language. PETINA is a prototype with rather shallow knowledge and simplistic form of reasoning. Thus, it was strai...