A THOMAS Based Multi-Agent System for Recommendations and Guidance in Malls
— This article presents a case study in which the THOMAS architecture is applied in order to obtain a multi-agent system (MAS) that can provide recommendations and guidance in a shopping mall. THOMAS is made up of a group of related modules that are well-suited for developing systems in other highly volatile environments similar to a shopping mall. Because the development of this type of system is complex, it is essential to thoroughly analyze the intrinsic characteristics of typical environment applications, and to design all of the system components at a very high level of abstraction. I. INTRODUCTION his article presents a dependable solution for using a novel architecture in designing and building a system for guiding and advising users in a shopping mall. A shopping mall can be considered a dynamic and volatile environment in which shops change, promotions appear and disappear, and the products that are offered are continually changing. As such, a high level design with an abstract architecture is essential. The architecture we used is THOMAS (MeTHods, techniques and tools for Open Multi-Agent Systems) [6][7]. THOMAS is a new architecture for open MAS and is made up of a group of related modules that are well-suited for developing systems in other highly volatile environments similar to a shopping mall. This design will use a high level of abstraction to determine which components are necessary for addressing all of the needs and characteristics of a shopping mall guidance system. Artificial intelligence techniques have given way to new studies that allow, among other things, modeling the problem of a shopping mall in terms of agents and MAS. The shopping mall is turned into an intelligent environment where users are surrounded by these techniques, but do not need to adapt to them. One of the objectives of MAS is to build systems capable of autonomous and flexible decision-making, and that will cooperate with other systems within a " society " [5]. This " society " must consider characteristics such as distribution, continual evolution and flexibility, all of which allow the