AI agents used to smooth wrinkles in housing project

Computerworld - Halfway through its Plan for Transformation, a $1.6 billion effort to refurbish or rebuild 25,000 public housing units, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is dealing with an unexpected wrinkle in its plans to relocate residents during the project.
While officials from the CHA had planned to relocate residents to temporary housing once -- a massive logistical undertaking -- they have found that many have to move multiple times for unexpected reasons before work on their permanent homes is done.
To tackle this jolt and other fluctuating factors, such as special needs for seniors and housing-unit availability, the agency has relied on its Tenant Relocation Services Application, a software system that uses agent technology from Agentis Software Inc. in Walnut Creek, Calif., to make real-time adjustments.
CHA officials said this week the application's return on investment has been far greater than expected thus far.
Agent technology -- distributed software components that can realign processes to meet goals without intervention -- is a practical application born from laboratory research into artificial intelligence.
When business requirements change for the CHA during the project, the application can be modified incrementally to manage exception handling without expensive and time-consuming recoding efforts, said Barbara Banks, CHA's CIO. Banks said the agency was able to slash by 50% the budgeted cost of building and making changes to the application.
"This [project requires] a process that has never been done before, and it is constantly changing," Banks said. "We may not necessarily understand all the requirements on the front end. There are not applications on shelves we can grab and use. We needed something that was flexible."
As part of the project, residents can either move to a temporary public-housing unit or receive a voucher to live in private housing. If forced to move from the new housing early, the authority is responsible for finding new housing.
The latest version of the system, completed by agency developers last October, has eight modules of business processes to track and adjust to various relocation issues, which can include provisioning appliances and providing security deposits and moving reimbursement, said Banks.
The Agentis AdaptivEnterprise Solution Suite has tools to decompose a problem into a series of goals and plans to achieve those goals, said Matt Sweetnam, principal consultant at Agentis.
Thus, the software can adapt to provide appliances for tenants only under specific circumstances. For example, once a moving client's appliances reach a set age, the system can place an order with a vendor and schedule an installation for tenants. And the