Agreement technologies applied to transmission towers maintenance.

Among the most indispensable elements required by a city is electric power and the transmission towers used for its distribution. These towers have underground electrodes which must be reviewed on a regular basis by controlling different parameters to ensure that electrical resistance is in a secure range in order to avoid problems and risks. Using artificial intelligence, it is possible to ensure proper maintenance of the towers by estimating the required values and proposing a reduction in the size of the population sample, which will minimize the cost of operation. The use of an intelligent-agent virtual-organization based architecture is proposed within this working environment. By using mathematical estimation models and agreement based negotiations, the architecture is capable of maximizing estimations and minimizing associated costs. The proposed model has been evaluated with the developed software through a real case study, which permitted us to validate the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]