Abstract—Lately Maritime research areas have moved their interests from traditional ship studies and traffic systems to new areas that confer a more general character to them as, for example, environmental monitoring. BOYAS project is proposed including these new perspectives as well as more classical ones. Trying to get this integral character for the waterway ambient and its activities management, the confluence between two recent research areas is studied. The convergence of Multiagent Systems and Wireless Sensor Networks constitutes a good framework and scenario in which this new research activities may be studied and develop. Keywords—Wireless Sensor Networks, Multiagent Systems, Buoys, Inland waterway I. INTRODUCTION N recent years, maritime research has broadened its views to themes like environmental protection, use of information technologies, traffic management, safety and security. In this evolution intelligent techniques play a fundamental role. The application of Neural Networks, Expert Systems or Automatic Learning is quite common in transport systems but most of these applications are focused on road traffic management while maritime environments receive less attention [6]. Indeed, these intelligent techniques are mostly applied to tools related to ship design aspects, like the one presented in [18], and for the development of simulation tools for logistic studies of the port areas [10]. Designing maritime systems that meet the objectives posed by previous mentioned new perspectives is a difficult task. But these difficulties can be alleviated by introducing appropriate technologies. BOYAS project focuses on all such aspects. Knowing the characteristics of the environment and the goals that the system has to reach, two research areas converge on the solution: Multiagent Systems and Wireless Sensor Networks. There are some studies about the application and This work has been funded by the Government of Spain, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. Reference: FIT-340000-2006-24 deployment of sensor networks for maritime environment monitoring [22]. But Wireless Sensor Networks have introduced a novel paradigm for reliable monitoring activities. They can be deployed in almost any environment and ease the transmission and information collection activities. On the other hand, Multiagent Systems capabilities help with the information management and the system organization, being the perfect complement to the Wireless Sensor Network. At this confluence is found the BOYAS project. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, Multiagent System research area is revised. Section 3 presents the numerous Multiagent Systems application areas and so motivates its use in the BOYAS project. In Section 4 basic characteristics of Wireless Sensor Networks are revised. Section 5 presents the core of BOYAS project, focusing on its structure, main characteristics and challenging issues. Finally, in Section 6 some conclusions about the presented work are drawn. II. DISTRIBUTED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS ISTRIBUTED Artificial Intelligence (DAI) appeared around the eighties as a consequence of the evolution from centralized architectures to distributed systems. It arose from multiple disciplines so different as Sociology, Operational Research, Artificial Intelligence or Philosophy, fact that confers to DAI a very general character. DAI can be defined as the study, construction and application of so called Multiagent Systems (MAS). A Multiagent System is a system in which several interacting intelligent agents pursue some set of goals or perform some set of tasks [13]. This research area appeared to help in the resolution of big problems whose data could be distributed, heterogeneous or even incomplete. This kind of situations requires too distributed activities and intelligence. Other appropriate areas for MAS application are those situations that just need a distributed point of view for being studied. Solving complex problems using MAS consists basically of dividing these problems into smaller ones. The integration in the resolution process of different perspectives of analysis together with fault-tolerance mechanisms reduces the uncertainty of the final solutions. Global efficiency of the Design of an intelligent waterway ambient infrastructure based on Multiagent Systems and Wireless Sensor Networks Mª del Carmen Delgado, Pablo Cortés, Luis Onieva, Alejandro Escudero I D INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS, ENGINEERING & DEVELOPMENT Issue 4, Volume 2, 2008 137