Laboratoire de Génie Informatique et d’Automatique de l’Artois

The main problematic of this thesis, which takes place in the context of the european project InTraDE (Intelligent Transportation for Dynamic Environment), deals with the modeling of systems of systems (SoS). A SoS is a system composed of a hierarchy of autonomous systems present in several representation levels. This thesis answers the need of generic modeling tools respecting the fundamental characteristics of SoS, proposing a multi-level multi-agent formalism and algorithms wich insure their respect. The use of a multi-agent model allows to take advantage of the natural autonomy of agents and the multi-level aspect of our model permits to modeled entities to reason about the organisational hierarchy of the system, carrying the explicit notion of level.

Besides the modeling of complex systems, this thesis also deals with the problematic related to their simulations, particularly, the fact that computer resources (used memory and microchips) needed to simulate with precision such systems are truly important. We propose a methodology to benefit from the muli-level simulations capacity to produce compromise between the simulation precision and the used computer resources.