A prolog-based MAS for railway signalling monitoring: Implementation and experiments

This paper describes the outcomes of a project that involved DISI, the Computer Science Department of Genoa University, and Ansaldo Segnalamento Ferroviario, the Italian leader in design and construction of signalling and automation systems for conventional and high speed railway lines. The result of the project, started in February 2008 and ended in September 2008, is an implemented MAS prototype that monitors processes running in a railway signalling plant, detects functioning anomalies, and provides support to the early notification of problems to the Command and Control System Assistance. The MAS has been implemented using DCaseLP, a multi-language prototyping environment developed at DISI, that provides libraries for integrating TuProlog agents into Jade. Due to the intrinsic rule-based nature of monitoring agents, Prolog has been proved extremely suitable for their implementation.