The Information Agent: An Infrastructure Agent Supporting Collaborative Enterprise Architectures

this paper is to present our concept of information agent and to show how this concept is realised in an architecture that integrates several recent approaches to knowledge representation and knowledge sharing. First, our information agent relies on a description logic language as the underlying representational and inferential substrate. Second, it extends this substrate with a new conflict management model and with a specific temporal reasoning capability. Third, it integrates in this environment recent languages including KQML [7] for the high level communication protocol and KIF [9] as the interlingua for knowledge communication. 2.0 The Information Agen

Conflict Management with a Credibility/Deniability Model

When a reasoning system encounters a contradiction like p&q=>false, it may try to eliminate it by retracting some belief that supports either p or q. This paper addresses the issue of how to determine which of the possible supporting beliefs to retract. The problem is studied in the context of organizational multi-agent systems in which we can not make assumptions about how agents derive their beliefs. The presented model considers two properties of beliefs: the credibility (competence) of the agents that provided the belief in the first place and the costs incurred upon other agents that already used the belief (directly or indirectly) for their own decision making or action, if the belief is to be retracted. The model is implemented as a service of an agent programming shell we have created for enterprise integration

Integrating Communicative Action, Conversations and Decision Theory to Coordinate Agents

The coordination problem in multi-agent systems is the problem of managing dependencies between the activities of autonomous agents, in conditions of incomplete knowledge about the dynamically changing environment and about the actions, reactions and goals of the agents populating it, such that to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants and a level of coherence in the behavior of the system as a whole. The paper articulates a precise conceptual model of coordination as structured "conversations " involving communicative actions, amongst agents. The model is extended to a complete language design that provides objects and control structures that substantiate its concepts and allow the construction of real multi-agent systems in industrial domains. To account for the uncertainty of the environment and to capture user's prefernces about the possible actions we integrate decision theoretic elements based on Markov Decision Processes. Finally, to support incremental, in ..

Capturing And Modeling Coordination Knowledge For Multi-Agent Systems

this paper we focus on the solutions we are providing for the outer layer of the architecture. They are embedded into a domain independent COOrdination Lan3 guage (COOL) that provides services for defining distributed agent configurations, managing communication, defining and managing structured interactions amongst agents, external software integration and in context acquisition and debugging of coordination knowledge. As these solutions impact on the way agents manage change by information distribution and conflict resolution, we also address these aspects showing how the coordination service supports these tasks. The paper is structured as follows. In section 2 we review the work in Distributed Artificial Intelligence from several perspectives and define our research goals. As the subsequent presentation of our tools is carried out in the context of our main application, the agent-based integration of the supply chain of manufacturing enterprises, we continue in section 3 with presenting this application domain. Section 4 deals with the main subject of the paper, the components of the coordination language. We illustrate the language throughout with examples from the supply chain. Section 5 then deals with the coordination knowledge acquisition service that allows users to extend and debug coordination knowledge on-line. To show how the coordination system is integrated with other reasoning tasks in the Agent Building Shell, in section 6 we review two other services of the architecture that make use of the coordination framework, cooperative information distribution and cooperative conflict management. In the end, we discuss some related approaches and provide concluding remarks

The Information Agent: An Infrastructure Agent Supporting Collaborative Enterprise Architectures

: We introduce the Information Agent as a component of the information infrastructure supporting collaborative enterprises. We discuss the functions of the Information Agent and illustrate them in the context of the Integrated Supply Chain Management system. We introduce a simple structure for the Information Agent, composed of an Agent Program and a Problem Solver and we present our choices for these components. We show how the problem-solving component can be designed and implemented using description logic representation systems and argue for the advantages of this approach. For the Agent Program, we adopt a speech-act based agent communication language (KQML). Keywords: enterprise information architecture, agent programming, description logics, agent communication language, conflict management, change management. 1.0 Introduction The productivity of complex enterprises is increasingly limited not by labor or capital, but by information. The enterprise's ability to process informa..

The Design of a Coordination Language for Multi-Agent Systems

. The agent view provides a level of abstraction at which we envisage computational systemscarrying out cooperative work by interoperating across networked people, organizations and machines. A major challenge in building such systems is coordinating the behavior of the individual agents to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants. In this paper we propose a conceptualization of the coordination task around the notion of structured "conversation" amongst agents. Based on this notion we build a complete multiagent programming language and system for explicitly representing, applying and capturing coordination knowledge. The language provides KQML-based communication, an agent definition and execution environment, support for describing interactions as multiple structured conversations among agents, rule-based approaches to conversation selection, conversation execution and event handling, a model and an interactive graphical tool for in context acquisition and debuggi..

Dynamic Team Formation and Management in an Agent Structured Supply Chain

Coordination is the process of managing dependencies between the activities of autonomous agents, in conditions of incomplete knowledge about the dynamically changing environment and about the actions, reactions and goals of the agents populating it, such that to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants and a level of coherence in the behavior of the system as a whole. An important situation where coordination plays a central role is the formation and management of dynamic teams in a virtual enterprise. In this paper we review our model of coordination as "structured conversations" among agents and the associated "coordination language" for multiagent system development, and then we show how these can be used to design and implement the coordination structures required to control the formation and management of agent teams for virtual manufacturing organizations. A specific aspect of the proposed coordination technology is that it can provide for adaptive run time be..