Software Agents-An Emergent Software Technology That Enables Us To Build MoreDynamic, Adaptable, and Robust Systems

摘要

The oil and gas industry need to improve operationalrnefficiency, and to address more demanding government issuedrnrequirements with respect to environmental safety inrnvulnerable areas such as the artic north. These requirementsrndrive for new IT solutions, solutions not possible to implementrnusing the more traditional approaches to softwarerndevelopment.rnThese new solutions must be able to sense thernenvironment, make decisions without human intervention, andrninvolve humans when needed. In the latter situation thernsoftware can be used to prioritize problems that need humanrnattention and assist the human in making better decisions withrnrespect to the available information and situation at hand.rnSoftware agents provide the capabilities needed to buildrnthe necessary IT systems, and they have during the last 15rnyears been applied successfully in safety critical systems suchrnas military target prioritization [9] and space shuttle operationrn[10]. Less dramatic solutions involve optimization of air fieldrnrunways and scheduling of transport capacity in terms of shipsrnand vehicles.rnTo explore the capabilities of software agents, Statoil hasrnimplemented several demonstrators addressing problems inrnconstraint-based planning and business process support.rnIn this paper we will present how software agents can bernused to improve decisions in core oil industry processes suchrnas drilling, production, processing and operation &rnmaintenance. The main focus will be the on production,rnprocessing and operation & maintenance as these threernprocesses can be directly supported by the same softwarernagents. Drilling must be supported by another set of agentsrnbecause drilling operations are conducted during a differentrnphase of the development using different infrastructure.An interesting observation from our own prototyping effortrnillustrated in figure 3 is that the three processes production,rnprocessing and operations & maintenance can be supported byrnless than 10 software agents in its initial outline. This is asrnexpected, according to Dr. Ronnquist, and illustrates thernpower of software agents as a software design tool [11].