Authors:
Andreia Malucelli
1
;
Ana Paula Rocha
2
and
Eugénio Oliveira
2
Affiliations:
1
LIACC-NIAD&R, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto;PUCPR – Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Brazil
;
2
LIACC-NIAD&R, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Ontologies, e-Commerce and e-business: B2B and B2C, Virtual Enterprises.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agent-Based Information Systems
;
Communication and Software Infrastructure
;
Distributed Intelligent Agents
;
e-Business
;
e-Commerce and e-Business: B2B and B2C
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Global Communication Information Systems and Services
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Mobile and Pervasive Computing
;
Telecommunications
;
Virtual Enterprises
Abstract:
In an efficient Virtual Enterprise (VE), where all the partners, both sending and receiving messages have to lead to acceptable and meaningful agreements, it is necessary to have common standards (an interaction protocol to achieve deals, a language for describing the messages’ content and ontology for describing the domain’s knowledge). This paper introduces first the ForEV platform, implemented through a Multi-Agent System. This platform facilitates partners’ selection automatic process in the context of VE and includes a negotiation protocol through multi-criteria and distributed constraint formalisms, as well as a reinforcement learning algorithm. Then, Ontology-based Services are proposed to be integrated in ForEV architecture in order to help in the VE formation process. These services will make the platform more open, enabling the establishment of the negotiation process between agents with different ontologies although representing the same domain of knowledge. An Ontology-ba
sed Services Agent is the responsible for providing the Ontology-based Services and monitoring the whole agents interaction just in time, without needing of a previous and tedious complete ontology mapping process. In our architecture each agent (either market or enterprise) has its own architecture and functionalities (some developer will design and build the ontology with some tool and, later, the agent will access the generated file/database), which implies the heterogeneity of the all Multi-Agent System.
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