Abacus : A multi-agent system for meteorological radar data management and decision support

The Meteorological Service of Cyprus operates a Doppler radar at the mountainous region of the island. Data-streams recorded by the radar are used for weather forecasting and, especially, for identifying oncoming precipitation incidents and issuing (potential) warnings. However, the continuous processing and evaluation of radar data requires significant efforts by the meteorologists, both for data processing, storage, and maintenance, as well as for data interpretation and visualization. To assist meteorologists and to automate a large part of these tasks, we have developed Abacus, a multi-agent system for managing radar data and providing decision support. Abacus' agents undertake data-management and visualization tasks, while they are also responsible for extracting statistical indicators and assessing current weather conditions. In addition, Abacus' agents can identify potentially hazardous incidents, disseminate preprocessed information over the web, and enable warning services are provided via email. In this paper, Abacus' agent architecture is detailed and agent communication for information diffusion is discussed. Focus is also given on the fully customizable logical rule-bases used for agent reasoning required in decision-support. The platform has been tested with real-world data from the Meteorological Service of Cyprus. * Send correspondence to: Ioannis N. Athanasiadis (ionathan@ee.auth.gr) In Sixth Int’l Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS-05), (Jakeman, A. and Swayne, D. A., Eds.), Sesimbra, Portugal, International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), May 2005.