基于多AGENT的虚拟企业伙伴选择系统

伙伴选择是虚拟企业建立过程中的核心问题。在基于多agent的虚拟企业体系结构基础上,通过本体驱动的虚拟企业目标体系描述与分解,将虚拟企业伙伴选择问题表示为分布式约束满足和优化问题,并进一步以agent谈判的方式来求解该问题,最终得到优化的伙伴选择方案。本体驱动的虚拟企业目标描述与分解方法,为不同企业之间的谈判提供了通用词汇;用分布式约束满足和优化的方法对问题进行形式化描述,可以为企业之间的谈判提供论域和决策支持。分布式约束满足和优化方法的应用,为解决虚拟企业伙伴选择问题提供了一种新思路。     

A multi-agent based system for e-procurement exception management

E-procurement has become an important function of enterprise information systems. The process of e-procurement includes the automatic definition of product requirements, search and selection for suppliers, negotiation and contracting with suppliers. However, the adoption of e-procurement encounters various uncertainties from internal and external environments, such as inventory failure, sharp increased demand, and delivery delay. In this paper, we propose a novel agent-based architecture for an e-procurement system in which agent technology is applied to deal with the internal and external uncertainties. Through the collaboration and interaction between different agents, the architecture that we propose can enhance the flexibility to handle unexpected exceptions, thus leading to agile procurement management. To valid the feasibility of our approach, a case study has been conducted to investigate how our agents collaborate to manage the inventory failure exception which occurs in restaurant e-procurement.     

Ontologies for supporting negotiation in e-commerce

In this paper we present our experience in applying Semantic Web technology to automated negotiation. This result is a novel approach to automated negotiation, that is particularly suitable to open environments such as the Internet. In this approach, agents can negotiate in any type of marketplace regardless of the negotiation mechanism in use. In order to support a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms, protocols are not hard-coded in the agents participating to negotiations, but are expressed in terms of a shared ontology, thus making this approach particularly suitable for applications such as electronic commerce. The paper describes a novel approach to negotiation, where the negotiation protocol does not need to be hard-coded in agents, but it is represented by an ontology: an explicit and declarative representation of the negotiation protocol. In this approach, agents need very little prior knowledge of the protocol, and acquire this knowledge directly from the marketplace. The ontology is also used to tune agents’ strategies to the specific protocol used. The paper presents this novel approach and describes the experience gained in implementing the ontology and the learning mechanism to tune the strategy.     

Service-oriented architecture for ontologies supporting multi-agent system negotiations in virtual enterprise

This paper offers a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for ontology-based multi-agent system (MAS) negotiations in the context of virtual enterprises (VEs). The objective of this paper is fourfold. First, it is to design a SOA which utilizes ontology and MAS to provide a distributed and interoperable environment for automated negotiations in VE. In this architecture, individual ontologies for both the VE initiator and its potential partners are constructed to describe and store resources and service knowledge. Second, a series of semantic ontology matching methods are developed to reach agents’ interoperability during the negotiation process. Third, correspondence-based extended contract net protocol is presented, which provides basic guidelines for agents’ reaching mutual understandings and service negotiation. Last, a fuzzy set theory based knowledge reuse approach is proposed to evaluate the current negotiation behaviors of the VE partners. A walkthrough example is presented to illustrate the methodologies and system architecture proposed in this paper.     

Outbound logistics exception monitoring: A multi-perspective ontologies’ approach with intelligent agents

Logistics consists of a complex network of organizations and processes where exception monitoring is critical for the success of logistics service. In order to detect exceptions effectively, exception monitoring requires proper understanding of the possible exceptions. However, the extant exception monitoring approaches or systems still lack sufficient emphasis in exceptions understanding. This paper presents a novel outbound logistics exception monitoring approach by incorporating multi-perspective ontologies and intelligent agents. Specially, the multi-perspective ontologies, involving static ontology, social ontology and dynamic ontology, are firstly employed to develop the taxonomy of the logistics exception, to reflect the situation dependencies of logistics exception and to represent the dynamic nature of business processes. From this point forwards, an outbound exception monitoring system is designed by introducing multi-intelligent agents, which can ensure autonomous, flexible, and collaborative exception monitor in logistics service. Finally, the presented approach and designed system are exhibited through a case study of two ubiquitous logistics exceptions, which indicates that the proposed multi-perspective ontologies provide better understanding of exceptions thereby enabling the designed outbound exception monitoring system to perform well.     

基于多Agent供应链协同的自适应协商方法

在供应链协同过程中常出现价格、数量、交货时间等冲突,若不及时消解会影响供应链的整体利益。为有效化解供应链协同冲突,弥补传统协商缺点,提出一种基于多Agent的自适应协商方法。该方法以二级供应链,即制造商和供应商的订货为研究对象,使用多Agent供应链协同作为约束条件,采用案例推理为主要协商算法,引入灰色关联度到案例集与目标案例相似度中,将遗传算法应用于相似案例议题权重的优化中。通过算例验证该方法可简化案例相似度的计算,提高解决冲突的效率,并加强自适应性,为消解冲突提供最优决策。     

虚拟环境下的访问控制模型

安全方便地获取共享信息资源是虚拟企业成功的关键因素。该文分析了一个虚拟企业访问控制的基本要求,提出一个虚拟企业访问控制模型,该模型由管理公共资源的基于项目的访问控制和管理私有资源的基于角色的访问控制这2个子模型构成。给出了该模型的组成和系统结构,实现了虚拟企业之间的资源管理和共享。     

Agent negotiation based ontology refinement process and mechanisms for service applications

Nowadays organisations are willing to outsource their business processes as services and make them accessible via the Web. In doing so, they can dynamically combine individual services to their service applications. However, unless the data on the Web can be meaningfully shared and is interpretable, this objective cannot be realised. In this paper, a new agent-based approach for managing ontology evolution in a Web services environment is exploited. The proposed approach has several key characteristics such as flexibility and extensibility that differentiate this research from others. The refinement mechanisms which cope with an evolving ontology are carefully examined. The novelty of our work is that inter-processes between different ontologies are studied from the agent’s perspective. Based on this perspective, an agent negotiation model is applied to reach an agreement regarding ontology discrepancy in an application. The efficiency and effectiveness of reaching an agreement over an ontology dispute is leveraged by the private negotiation strategy applied in the argumentation approach. An extended negotiation strategy is discussed to enable sufficient information in decision making at each negotiation round. A case study is presented to demonstrate ontology refinement in a Web services environment.     

Exception representation and management in open multi-agent systems

One of the major issues in dealing with exceptions in open multi-agent systems (MAS) is lack of uniform representation of exceptions and their shared semantics. In the absence of a uniform framework different business organizations may use different representations for the same exception or may interpret the same exception in different ways. In order to address this issue we apply an ontological approach as a uniform way of representing and interpreting exceptions in cross-organizational settings. This helps agents from different organizations interpret exceptional situations in an unambiguous way and exchange exception related information using standard structures. We believe that an exception ontology along with a domain ontology increases the open MAS reliability and also enhances its fault tolerance capability. The proposed ontology is built using the ontological support provided by the JADE agent framework and exception diagnoses agents are implemented using the JACK™ agent framework.     

Exception Handling for Conflict Resolution in Cross-Organizational Workflows

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) are being increasingly deployed to deliver e-business transactions across organizational boundaries. To ensure a high service quality in such transactions, exception-handling schemes for conflict resolution are needed. The conflicts primarily arise due to failure of a task in workflow execution because of underlying application, or controlling WfMS component failures or insufficient user input. So far, little progress has been reported in addressing conflict resolution in cross-organizational business processes, though its importance has been recognized. In this paper, we identify the exception handling techniques that support conflict resolution in cross-organizational settings. In particular, we propose a novel, bundled exception-handling approach, which supports (1) exception knowledge sharing--sharing exception specifications and handling experiences, (2) coordinated exception handling, and (3) intelligent problem solving--using case based reasoning to reuse exception handing experiences. A prototype of this exception handling mechanism is developed and integrated as a part of the METEOR Workflow Management System. An evaluation of our approach is also presented through some sample workflow applications.     

An ontological intelligent agent platform to establish an ecological virtual enterprise

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a dynamic alliance of companies collaborating for the accomplishment of a specific business goal. To establish a VE, it is very important for the VE initiator to select appropriate partners. General criteria such as price, lead time, quality, etc. are the major concerns for most VE initiators. However, in today’s environmentally conscious society, environmental issues such as enterprise green image, product eco-design, etc. are increasingly receiving attention. Thus, it is worth to research on how to select the appropriate collaborative partners to establish an ecological VE.The objective of this paper is to establish a multi-agent system platform for individual companies to form an ecological VE based on ontology theory and intelligent agents. The ontological approaches include shared ontology construction, ontology matching, ontology integration, ontology storage and ontology reasoning. In the generalized case that the VE initiator is a manufacturer and the collaborating partner are suppliers, the multi-agent system comprises three types of intelligent agents, namely, knowledge manager agent (KMrA), manufacturer agent (MA) and supplier agent (SA). MA and SA represent the capabilities and interests of the VE initiator and the VE partners, respectively. KMrA is in charge of functioning sub-tasks of the ontological approach. To select partners for the ecological VE, the VE initiator will also consider the environmental criteria, in addition to the general supplier selection criteria such as price, quantity, quality and lead time. The environmental criteria may include factors such as environmental management, green image, green product and pollution control. The complete set of selection criteria, including the environmental criteria, are categorised into quantitative or qualitative criteria. The formation of ecological VE is then divided into two stages, that is, candidate supplier selection based on qualitative criteria, and ultimate supplier selection based on quantitative criteria. A simplified example is introduced to illustrate and justify the proposed ontological approaches and intelligent agent platform.     

A Formal Virtual Enterprise Access Control Model

A virtual enterprise (VE) refers to a cooperative alliance of legally independent enterprises, institutions, or single persons that collaborate with each other by sharing business processes and resources across enterprises in order to raise enterprise competitiveness and reduce production costs. Successful VEs require complete information transparency and suitable resource sharing among coworkers across enterprises. Hence, this investigation proposes a formal flexible integration solution, named the formal VE access control (VEAC) model, based on the role-based AC model, to integrate and share distributed resources owned by VE members. The formal VEAC model comprises a fundamental VEAC model, a project AC policy (PACP) language model, and a model construction methodology. The fundamental VEAC model manages VE resources and the resources of participating enterprises, in which various project relationships are presented to facilitate different degrees of resource sharing across projects and enterprise boundaries, and cooperative modes among VE roles are presented to enable collaboration among coworkers in a VE. This PACP language model features object-subject-action-condition AC policies that jointly determine user access authorizations. In addition, the methodology supplies a systematic method to identify fundamental elements of the VEAC model and to establish assignments between elements and relations.     

Knowledge-based system for collaborative process specification

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the design of a collaborative business process model (CBP). This CBP is considered as a specification of needs in order to build a collaboration information system (CIS) for a network of organizations. The study is a part of a model-driven engineering approach of the CIS in a specific enterprise interoperability framework that will be summarised. An adaptation of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is used to represent the CBP model. We develop a knowledge-based system (KbS) which is composed of three main parts: knowledge gathering, knowledge representation and reasoning, and collaborative business process modelling. The first part starts from a high abstraction level where knowledge from business partners is captured. A collaboration ontology is defined in order to provide a structure to store and use the knowledge captured. In parallel, we try to reuse generic existing knowledge about business processes from the MIT Process Handbook repository. This results in a collaboration process ontology that is also described. A set of rules is defined in order to extract knowledge about fragments of the CBP model from the two previous ontologies. These fragments are finally assembled in the third part of the KbS. A prototype of the KbS has been developed in order to implement and support this approach. The prototype is a computer-aided design tool of the CBP. In this paper, we will present the theoretical aspects of each part of this KbS as well as the tools that we developed and used in order to support its functionalities.     

An ontology based approach to organize multi-agent assisted supply chain negotiations

Effective supply chain management (SCM) comprises activities involving the demand and supply of resources and services. Negotiation is an essential approach to solve conflicting transaction and scheduling problems among supply chain members. The multi-agent system (MAS) technology has provided the potential of automating supply chain negotiations to alleviate human interactions. Software agents are supposed to perform on behalf of their human owners only when equipped with sophisticated negotiation knowledge. To better organize the negotiation knowledge utilized by agents and facilitate agents’ adaptive negotiation decision making ability, an ontology-based approach is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the multi-agent assisted supply chain negotiation scheme is presented to configure the general design components of the negotiation system, covering the agent intelligence modules, the knowledge organization method and the negotiation protocol. Then, the ontology-based negotiation knowledge organization method is specified. The negotiation knowledge is separated into shared negotiation ontology and private negotiation ontology to ensure both the agent communicative interoperability and the privacy of strategic knowledge. Inference rules are defined on top of the private negotiation ontology to guide agents’ reasoning ability. Through this method, agents’ negotiation behaviors will be more adaptive to various negotiation environments utilizing corresponding negotiation knowledge.     

New perspectives in ontological analysis: Guidelines and rules for incorporating modelling languages into UEML

Ontological analysis of modelling languages has been mainly used for evaluating quality of modelling language w.r.t. one specific upper ontology. Generally speaking this evaluation has been done by identifying the coverage of the modelling language constructs w.r.t. the ontology and vice-versa. However, a quite limited support has been developed for performing the ontological analysis task. Specifically, various ontologies used for ontological analysis are not associated to a machine readable format; the coverage of modelling language constructs is mostly provided by informal tables mapping one construct on to one ontological concept; the way in which this coverage task is undertaken is poorly specified (resulting in distinct results for distinct experts involved), and finally, preventing any ontology enrichment for dealing with some specialised language constructs. This limited support also prevents application of ontological analysis outcomes to problems and domains dealing with interoperability, integration and integrated usage of enterprise and IS models, which is today one of the key aspects for making interoperable, maintainable and evolvable inter and intra enterprise software systems. The paper provides an overview of the Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) approach, which introduces advanced support to ontological analysis of modelling languages. The paper is specifically focused on the task of ontological analysis of modelling languages (named incorporation of modelling languages) by introducing and explaining several guidelines and rules for driving the task: therefore, not all the aspects of the UEML approach will be discussed through the paper. The guidelines and rules are illustrated by incorporation of three selected modelling constructs from IDEF3, a well known language for specifying enterprise processes.     

A rule-based approach to proactive exception handling in business processes

Effectively handling exceptions in business process is an important capability of enterprises in the current global market environment, since their business processes are becoming more complex. Effective exception handling requires systematic support for the entire scope of exception handling: from exception prediction to exception prevention, and from exception detection to exception resolution. Most existing research approaches to exception handling in business process management and workflow areas have focused on reactive exception handling which resolves exceptions only after their occurrences. Therefore, a proactive exception handling approach is required to predict and prevent business process exceptions as early as possible before they occur, and detect and resolve exceptions as soon as possible after they occur. This paper presents comprehensive behavioral, functional, and informational requirements for proactive exception handling from the lifecycle perspective. Then, it proposes a rule language for proactive exception handling based on the requirements. The proposed rule language will enable effective and flexible exception handling by providing the information required for the entire scope of exception handling, especially, for exception prediction and prevention. Finally, the paper illustrates and validates the rule language with an example of exception prevention and a prototype system.     

Web interface-driven cooperative exception handling in ADOME workflow management system

Exception handling in workflow management systems (WFMSs) is a very important problem since it is not possible to specify all possible outcomes and alternatives. Effective reuse of existing exception handlers can greatly help in dealing with workflow exceptions. On the other hand, cooperative support for user-driven computer supported resolution of unexpected exceptions and workflow evolution at run-time is vital for an adaptive WFMS. We have been developing ADOME-WFMS as a comprehensive framework in which the problem of workflow exception handling can be adequately addressed. In this article, we present an adaptive exception manager and its web-based interface for ADOME-WFMS with procedures for supporting the following: reuse of exception handlers, thorough and automated resolution of expected exceptions, effective management of Problem Solving Agents, cooperative exception handling, user-driven computer supported resolution of unexpected exceptions, and workflow evolution.     

支持工作流协作的企业供应链本体模型研究

本文重点阐述工作流协作、支持协作的本体模型的概念。提出支持协作的企业本体模型的建立方法,同时给出基于本体模型交换的供应链协作的设计思路。并通过实例说明了本体模型的建立过程。     

Conflict resolution in collaborative planning dialogs

In a collaborative planning environment in which the agents are autonomous and heterogeneous, it is inevitable that discrepancies in the agents' beliefs result in conflicts during the planning process. In such cases, it is important that the agents engage in collaborative negotiation to resolve the detected conflicts in order to determine what should constitute their shared plan of actions and shared beliefs. This paper presents a plan-based model for conflict detection and resolution in collaborative planning dialogs. Our model specifies how a collaborative system should detect conflicts that arise between the system and its user during the planning process. If the detected conflicts warrant resolution, our model initiates collaborative negotiation in an attempt to resolve the conflicts in the agent's beliefs. In addition, when multiple conflicts arise, our model identifies and addresses the most effective aspect in its pursuit of conflict resolution. Furthermore, by capturing the collaborative planning process in a recursive Propose–Evaluate–Modify cycle of actions, our model is capable of handling embedded negotiation during conflict resolution.     

Manufacturing enterprise collaboration based on a goal-oriented fuzzy trust evaluation model in a virtual enterprise

To cope with the rapidly changing manufacturing environment, enterprise collaboration is getting increasingly more attention than ever before. The virtual enterprise (VE) is a concept that supports temporary alliances of manufacturing enterprises that have various collaboration models, such as extended enterprise, networked enterprise, concurrent enterprise, etc. Selection of trustworthy partners and trust building are important in virtual domains because they have largely been affecting the success of a VE. However, because of its complexity of trust, trust models in the literature are limited in their ability to cope with dynamic and virtual environment. In this paper, we propose a trust evaluation method of supporting enterprise collaboration and maximizing the satisfaction of cooperation. In this context, trust means the goal achievement probability. Trust value of an enterprise can be obtained by a fuzzy inference system whose rule-base is based on the top-level goal of a VE. According to the selector’s preference, various rules can be applied to trust evaluation. For further study, the planning and scheduling problems should be considered along with the trust-based partner selection for collaboration among manufacturing enterprises.