Modelling Energy and Transport Infrastructures as a Multi-Agent System using a Generic Ontology

Considering infrastructures as socio-technical systems, the multi-agent paradigm is a good way to model these systems in order to study new control concepts to improve the efficiency and reliability of infrastructures. Agent Based Models (ABM) allow the modeller to build models in a bottom-up way, thus having the freedom to experiment with different designs of the network emerging from local decision making. This paper describes a generic approach for building such models using a generic ontology of the infrastructure domain that can be extended and specialised by including domain specific concepts. This approach has been used in proof of concept model and is currently being applied to both energy and transport infrastructures.