In the recent years, the concept of “port community” has been adopted by the maritime transport industry in order to achieve a higher degree of coordination and cooperation amongst organizations involved in the transfer of goods through the port area. The business processes of the port community supply chain form a complicated process which involves several process steps, multiple actors, and numerous information exchanges. One of the widely used applications of ICT in ports is the Port Community System (PCS) which is implemented in ports in order to reduce paperwork and to facilitate the information flow related to port operations and cargo clearance. However, existing PCSs are limited in functionalities that facilitate the management and coordination of material, financial, and information flows within the port community supply chain. This research programme addresses the use of agent technology to introduce business process management functionalities, which are vital for port communities, aiming to the enhancement of the performance of the port community supply chain. The investigation begins with an examination of the current state in view of the business perspective and the technical perspective. The business perspective focuses on understanding the nature of the port community, its main characteristics, and its problems. Accordingly, a number of requirements are identified as essential amendments to information systems in seaports. On the other hand, the technical perspective focuses on technologies that are convenient for solving problems in business process management within port communities. The research focuses on three technologies; the workflow technology, agent technology, and service orientation. An analysis of information systems across port communities enables an examination of the current PCSs with regard to their coordination and workflow management capabilities. The most important finding of this analysis is that the performance of the business processes, and in particular the performance of the port community supply chain, is not in the scope of the examined PCSs. Accordingly, the Agent-Based Middleware for Port Community Management (ABMPCM) is proposed as an approach for providing essential functionalities that would facilitate collaborative planning and business process management. As a core component of the ABMPCM, the Collaborative Planning Facility (CPF) is described in further details. A CPF prototype has been developed as an agent-based system for the domain of inland transport of containers to demonstrate its practical effectiveness. To evaluate the practical application of the CPF, a simulation environment is introduced in order to facilitate the evaluation process. The research started with the definition of a multi-agent simulation framework for port community supply chain. Then, a prototype has been implemented and employed for the evaluation of the CPF. The results of the simulation experiments demonstrate that our agent-based approach effectively enhances the performance of business process in the port community.

Context. Resource allocation is an important issue in order to complete a task in the field of agent system. Several protocols are available for task distribution and for efficient resource allocation among agents. Efficient task distribution and resource allocation among agents are often play important roles to obtain high performance. However, the situation becomes more complicated when the resources are dependent on each other where multiple buyers and providers of resources negotiate in parallel. Objectives. In this paper, we proposed an agent based protocol for synchronizing and allocating dependent resources that involves parallel negotiation between multiple buyers and providers of resources. Methods. Literature survey has been conducted in the studied areas in order to position the work and gain more knowledge. Moreover, to validate the proposed protocol, a simulation study was performed. Results. The suggested protocol can handle dependent resources negotiation parallel and the result illustrates that. Moreover, the approach can avoid broadcasting of call for proposals to reduce the communication overhead, which usually occur in many other protocols. Conclusion. In the suggested protocol, we have presented a new idea of re-planning with other techniques like Information board and leveled commitment. In a simulation study, it was identified that this approach is able to deal with the dependent resources according to the simulation results.

Les travaux de cette thèse portent sur la définition et la validation d’une méthode de modélisation-simulation de foule permettant le transfert des principes et des mesures établis dans un contexte source d'observations vers des contextes cibles, non observables a priori. A partir de l'observation de comportements de piétons d’un contexte environnemental, social et urbain, nous inférons les règles et des motivations, rendant possible la modélisation et la simulation du comportement individuel de piétons dans ce contexte source, puis à évaluer la transférabilité du modèle dans un autre contexte cible. Nous appuyons nos travaux sur un cas réel. Il s’agit de la simulation du comportement des voyageurs entrants et sortants des trains dans une gare à fort trafic. Après une revue des théories, de modèles de simulation, nous retenons une approche basée sur la simulation microscopique d’agents sociaux, situés, basée sur les motivations. Nous argumentons le choix par le fait que, par rapport à une simulation de foule classique elle, a priori, l’avantage de favoriser la transférabilité. L’objectif de cette simulation est d’étudier, entre autres, les évolutions architecturales des stations permettant de raccourcir les temps d’arrêt des trains. / This thesis focuses on the definition and the validation of a crowd-simulation modeling method. This method allows transferring principles and measurements established in a source observation context to a target one. From the observation of pedestrian behavior in a social and urban context, our approach infers rules and motivations in order to model and simulate the individual pedestrian behavior in this source context. This allows, in a second step, to evaluate the transferability of the model to a given target context. Our work is based on a real case: the simulation of the passenger’s behavior while boarding and alighting trains (platform-train exchange) in a high-traffic station (dense situation). Starting from the state of the art of theories, models and types of simulation, we choose an approach based on the microscopic simulation of social agent’s motivation. This choice relies mainly on the fact that, compared to a classic crowd simulation, it has, a priori, a better transferability potential. The goal of this type of simulation is to study the architectural evolutions of the stations that could allow to control or shorten train dwell times.