Supporting Multi-agent Coordination and Computational Collective Intelligence in Enterprise 2.0 Platform

In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing a professional Social network (Pro Social Network) and a new coordination protocol (CordiNet). Our motivation behind this article is to convince Small and Medium Enterprises managers that current organizations have chosen to use Enterprise 2.0 tools because these latter have demonstrated remarkable innovation as well as successful collaboration and collective intelligence. The particularity of our work is that is allows employer to share diagnosis and fault repair procedures on the basis of some modeling agents. In fact, each enterprise is represented by a container of agents to ensure a secured and confidential information exchange between intra employers, and a central main container to connect all enterprises’ containers for a social information exchange. Enterprise’s container consists of a Checker Enterprise Agent (ChEA), a Coordinator Enterprise Agent (CoEA) and a Search Enterprise Agent (SeEA). Whereas the central main container comprises its proper agents such as Selection Agent (SA), and a Supervisor Agent (SuA). JADE platform is used to allow agents to communicate and collaborate. The FIPA-ACL performatives have been extended for this purpose. We conduct some experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach

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.

An Effective Tool for the Experts' Recommendation Based on PROMETHEE II and Negotiation: Application to the Industrial Maintenance

In this article, we propose an expert recommendation tool that relies on the skills of experts and their interventions in collaboration. This tool provides us with a list of the most appropriate (effective) experts to solve business problems in the field of industrial maintenance. The proposed system recommends experts using an unsupervised classification algorithm that takes into account the competences of the experts, their preferences and the stored information in previous collaborative sessions. We have tested the performance of the system with K-means and C-means algorithms. To fix the inconsistencies detected in business rules, the PROMETHEE II multi-criteria decision support method is integrated into the extended CNP negotiation protocol in order to classify the experts from best to worst. The study is supported by the well known petroleum company in Algeria namely SONATRACH where the experimentations are operated on maintenance domain. Experiments results show the effectiveness of our approach, obtaining a recall of 86%, precision of 92% and F-measure of 89%. Also, the proposed approach offers very high results and improvement, in terms of response time (154.28 ms), space memory (9843912 bytes) and negotiation rounds

Conception et développement d'un système multi-agent d'aide à la décision pour la gestion de production dynamique

Une prise de décision efficace repose souvent sur le contrôle de l'information dans le temps, cette action vise à capturer des éléments d'information les plus importants qui sont mis à jour de différentes manières. L'intégration des agents aux Systèmes Interactifs d'Aide à la Décision (SIAD) fournit un moyen rentable pour la prise de décision. Les agents planifient dans le système et poursuivent leurs buts et sous-objectifs en coopérant, coordonnant leurs tâches et en négociant entre eux afin de répondre avec souplesse et intelligence aux situations dynamiques et imprévues. En gestion de production temps-réel, le système d'aide à la décision mémorise l'état courant de l'atelier. Il connaît à tout moment l'ensemble des décisions et des événements possibles. Nous distinguons trois contextes d'aide à la décision : (i) aide à la décision pour une séquence admissible; (ii) aide à la décision pour le recouvrement de l'admissibilité et (iii) aide à la décision et à la négociation entre les centres de décision hors du contexte planifié. La présente thèse propose un SIAD à base d'agents afin de résoudre certains problèmes d'incertitude dans le système d'ordonnancement de la production dynamique. Le système développé donne aux centres de décision la possibilité pour prendre des décisions dans un contexte dynamique. Plus précisément, les Stations Intégrées de Production (SIP) seront équipées d'un comportement suffisant pour exécuter des opérations concrètes et réagir simultanément à la complexité des problèmes causés par l'ordonnancement dynamique dans des situations réelles. Ces agents expriment leurs préférences en utilisant la méthode ELECTRE III, afin de résoudre les différences. Le mécanisme de négociation est basé sur le Protocole Contract Net (CNP). Le protocole développé sur JADE fournit des échanges de messages entre les agents et leur propose des comportements prédéfinis. L'approche est testée à travers des scénarii simples.An effective decision making is often based on control information in time. This action aims to capture the current state of the most important information elements updated in different ways. For Decision Support Systems (DSS), the software agents' integration provides an automated, cost-effective means for making decisions. The agents in the system autonomously plan and pursue their actions and sub-goals to cooperate, coordinate, and negotiate with others, and to respond flexibly and intelligently to dynamic and unpredictable situations. In real-time production management, the DSS memorizes the current state-of the workshop. It knows constantly all possible decisions and the possible events involved. We distinguish 3 contexts for the decision-making aid: (1) Decision-making aid in the context of an acceptable sequence; (2) Assistance for the admissibility covering; and (3) negotiation support among different decision-making centers in a dynamic context. The present thesis proposes an agent architecture-based DSS in order to solve some uncertainty problems in dynamic production system scheduling. The proposed DSS gives the decision centers the opportunity to make decisions in a dynamical context. Specifically, Integrated Station of Production agents (ISP) will be equipped with a sufficient behavior to carry out practical operations and simultaneously react to the complex problems caused by the dynamic scheduling in real situations. These agents express their preferences by using ELECTRE III method in order to solve differences. The negotiation mechanism is based on the Contract Net Protocol (CNP). The coordination protocol developed on JADE provides message exchanges between agents and offers them predefined behaviors. The approach is tested through simple scenarios

Novel Agent Based-approach for Industrial Diagnosis: A Combined use Between Case-based Reasoning and Similarity Measure

In spunlace nonwovens industry, the maintenance task is very complex, it requires experts and operators collaboration. In this paper, we propose a new approach integrating an agent- based modelling with case-based reasoning that utilizes similarity measures and preferences module. The main purpose of our study is to compare and evaluate the most suitable similarity measure for our case. Furthermore, operators that are usually geographically dispersed, have to collaborate and negotiate to achieve mutual agreements, especially when their proposals (diagnosis) lead to a conflicting situation. The experimentation shows that the suggested agent-based approach is very interesting and efficient for operators and experts who collaborate in INOTIS enterprise

An Adapted Approach for User Profiling in a Recommendation System: Application to Industrial Diagnosis

In this paper, we propose a global architecture of a recommender tool, which represents a part of an existing collaborative platform. This tool provides diagnostic documents for industrial operators. The recommendation process considered here is composed of three steps: Collecting and filtering information; Prediction or recommendation step; evaluating and improvement. In this work, we focus on collecting and filtering step. We mainly use information result from collaborative sessions and documents describing solutions that are attributed to the complex diagnostic problems. The developed tool is based on collaborative filtering that operates on users' preferences and similar responses

Supporting Multi-agent Coordination and Computational Collective Intelligence in Enterprise 2.0 Platform

In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing a professional Social network (Pro Social Network) and a new coordination protocol (CordiNet). Our motivation behind this article is to convince Small and Medium Enterprises managers that current organizations have chosen to use Enterprise 2.0 tools because these latter have demonstrated remarkable innovation as well as successful collaboration and collective intelligence. The particularity of our work is that is allows employer to share diagnosis and fault repair procedures on the basis of some modeling agents. In fact, each enterprise is represented by a container of agents to ensure a secured and confidential information exchange between intra employers, and a central main container to connect all enterprises’ containers for a social information exchange. Enterprise’s container consists of a Checker Enterprise Agent (ChEA), a Coordinator Enterprise Agent (CoEA) and a Search Enterprise Agent (SeEA). Whereas the central main container comprises its proper agents such as Selection Agent (SA), and a Supervisor Agent (SuA). JADE platform is used to allow agents to communicate and collaborate. The FIPA-ACL performatives have been extended for this purpose. We conduct some experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach

Conception et développement d'un système multi-agent d'aide à la décision pour la gestion de production dynamique

TOULOUSE3-BU Sciences (315552104) / SudocSudocFranceF

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.