A deployed multi agent system for meteorological alerts

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has a requirement for complex and evolving systems to manage its weather forecasting, monitoring and alerts. This paper describes a system that monitors in real time the current terminal area forecasts (forecasts for areas around airports) and alerts forecasters to inconsistencies between these and observations obtained from automatic weather station (AWS) data. The contributions of the paper are a description of the overall architecture including legacy components, and the mechanisms that have been used to interface to legacy components; a description of an inferencing mechanism, available in recent versions of the JACK Intelligent Agents toolkit which has been particularly useful in some of the reasoning needed in this application; and a detailed description of the architecture for data sharing and data management. The system is currently deployed and a project is underway to extend this to a much larger system.