Studies in Informatics and Control – ICI Bucharest
Sawsan SAAD, Hayfa ZGAYA
LAGIS UMR 8146, Ecole Central de Lille, France
Slim HAMMADI
LAGIS UMR 9146, Ecole Central de Lille, France
Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of negotiation process in a multi-agents system by using ontologies. Therefore, we present an ontology solution based on the knowledge management system for semantic heterogeneity. The proposed solution prevents the misunderstanding during the negotiation process through the agents’ communications. Our approach aims to enable agents able to understand each other when using these ontologies. Thus, we propose a general architecture for Negotiation process which uses Ontology-based Knowledge Management System (NOKMS). This architecture consists of three layers: the Negotiation Layer (NL) that describes the negotiation process between the Initiator Static Agents (ISAs) and the Participant Mobile Agents (PMAs) by using suitable ontologies, the Semantic Layer (SEL) contains the semantic translator which uses in the case of misunderstanding of the sent messages between the agents, and the last one is the Knowledge Management Systems Layer (KMSL) which bases on the Intelligent Knowledge Base (IKB) to give the flexibility to our negotiation ontology. In addition, we will illustrate an agent architecture which helps our architecture on applying the different operations in the different layers. Finally, we present a case study which applies our architecture on the Multimodal Transport Information System (MTIS) project where we will show two scenarios applicable: the first uses our negotiation ontology architecture in one transport system, and the second applies this architecture on the multi-transport systems. These case studies show that the proposed NOKMS improves the execution of negotiation process in multi-agents systems in order to satisfy the transport customers.
Keywords: Multi-Agents Systems, Negotiation, Ontology, Knowledge Management System, Transport Information System.
Sawsan Saad is currently a doctorate in LAGIS laboratory at the high France School, Ecole Centrale de Lille (EC-Lille) in the Optimization, the Artificial Intelligence and the Logistic field. Born in Salamieh (Syria) in 1979. She received the BSc degree in Computer Engineering from Al-Baath University (Syria) in 2003. She obtained her MSc degree in Information Systems in 2007 from INSA de Lyon (France). She was member of the Organizing Committees of international congress on “Logistic and Transport” LT’2007.
Dr. Hayfa Zgaya is teacher-researcher in Computing Science in LAGIS laboratory within the high France School Ecole Centrale de Lille (EC-Lille) where she obtained her PhD degree in July 2007. Her main research areas are the Optimization, the Artificial Intelligence and the Logistic field. Born in Tunis in 1978, she obtained her master’s degree in computer science in November 2001 from the France polytechnic high school of Nantes University. She takes an active part in the national working group ORT of GDR MACS and she was responsible of the Organizing Committees of international workshops MHOSI’ 2005, LT’2006 and LT’2007.
Slim Hammadi is a full Professor of production planning and control at the Ecole Centrale de Lille (French “Grande Ecole”). Born in Gafsa (Tunisia) in 1962, he has obtained by 1988 the Master degree in Computer science from the University of Lille (France). Pr Hammadi obtained a P.h.D degree in job-shop scheduling and control in 1991 at Ecole Centrale de Lille. He is a senior member of IEEE/SMC and has served as a referee for numerous journals including the IEEE Transactions on SMC. Pr. S. Hammadi was Co-Organizer of a Symposium (IMS) of the IMACS/IEEE SMC Multi conference CESA’98 held in Hammamet (Tunisia) in April 1998. He has organized several invited sessions in different SMC conferences where he was session chairman. He was chairman of the International congress on “Logistic and Transport” LT’2004, MHOSI’2005, LT’2006 and LT’2007. His teaching and research interests focus on the areas of production control, production planning, computer science, discrete and dynamic programming and computer integrated manufacturing.
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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Sawsan SAAD, Hayfa ZGAYA, Slim HAMMADI, Novel Ontology Model for Communicating Heterogeneous Negotiation Mobile-Agent in a Transport Environment, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 17 (4), pp. 333-352, 2008.