Design of an intelligent cart system for common airports

This paper presents a framework for an intelligent cart system designed to be used in common airports. This framework provides novel methods to control carts using mobile software agents. In airport terminals, it is desirable that carts draw themselves together automatically after being used so that manual collection becomes less laborious. In order to avoid excessive energy consumption by the carts, we employ mobile software agents and RFID to locate carts scattered in a field and cause them to autonomously determine their moving behavior using clustering based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm.