Integrating Agents into a Collaborative Knowledge-based System for Business Rules Consistency Management

Capitalization and reuse of expert knowledge are very important for the survival of an enterprise. This paper presents a collaborative approach that utilizes domain ontology and agents. Thanks to our knowledge formalizing process, we give to domain expert an opportunity to store different forms of retrieved knowledge from experiences, design rules, business rules, decision processes, etc. The ontology is built to support business rules management. The global architecture is mainly composed of agents such as Expert agent, Evaluator agent, Translator agent, Security agent and Supervisor agent. The Evaluator agent is at the heart of our functional architecture, its role is to detect the problems that may arise in the consistency management module and provides a solution to these problems in order to validate the accuracy of business rules. In addition, a Security agent is defined to handle both security aspects in rules modeling and multi-agent system. The proposed approach is different from the others in terms of the number of rule’s inconsistencies which are detected and treated like contradiction, redundancy, invalid rules, domain violation and rules never applicable, the collaboration that is initiated among business experts and the guarantee of security of the business rules and all the agents which constitute our system. The developed collaborative system is applied in an industrial case study.