Intelligent-agent systems are computational systems comprising multiple agents which are capable of making decisions and taking actions in an autonomous way. Agents maintain information about their environment and make decisions based on their perception about the state of this environment, their past experiences and their goals. Agents can also communicate with other agents and collaborate to reach common objectives. In this way, agents emulate the social behavior of humans: share partial views of a problem, enable collaboration and cooperation to make right and timely decisions and reach common objectives.

Agents are successfully implemented in both Internet and manufacturing industries. In the E&P industry the application of multi-agent systems is still incipient, but the potentialities of this kind of systems are acknowledged in the industry and there are several R&D groups working in specific applications of agent technology in asset operation and management.

In this lecture we will present one agent-based workflow automation architecture, which try to leverage the features of agent systems in an application for the oil production management. We will try to show how the nature of oil & gas production management can be represented over the information technology infrastructure using multi-agent system, reaching full-automated and intelligent workflow automation.