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.