Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Agent alliance formation using ART-networks as agent belief models

  • Published:
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In today’s hyper-competitive business environments virtual organisations are becoming highly dynamic and unpredictable. Individuals may want to work together across organisation boundaries but do not have much prior knowledge about potential partners. The semantic web and its associated new standards appear very promising as candidates to support a new generation of virtual organisations. Whilst knowledge can be represented in a machine interpretable way, social-like behaviours can be expected in a virtual organisation. In this paper ontology definition techniques from the semantic web are applied to define a virtual state space of a virtual organisation. Actors involved in an organisation, from high level strategy making members to low level physical devices, advertise their skills and local knowledge in a community. A task initiator, with a virtual sensor to perceive the advertised skills and with an adaptive belief model about the community, seeks for the best matched partners for cooperation. The belief model is a fuzzy neural network based on Adaptive Resonance Theory which takes the advertisements of actors as its initial belief and learns actors’ actual capabilities through interaction experience. Dynamic alliances can then take place in an automated/semi-automated way that exhibit adaptive ability, self-organisation, unsupervised learning and competition ability. The alliances thus exhibit the inherent characteristics of realistic enterprises or human societies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aerts A.T.M., Szirbik N.B., Goossenaerts J.B.M. (2002). A flexible, agent-based ICT architecture for virtual enterprises. Computers in Industry 49: 311–327

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Akoka J., Wattiau I.C. (1996). Entity-relationship and object-oriented model automatic clustering. Data & Knowledge Engineering 20: 87–117

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Avancha, S., Joshi, A., & Finin, T. (2002). Enhanced service discovery in Bluetooth. Communications, 96–99.

  • Baltrusch, R. (2001). Exploring organisational learning in virtual forms of organization. In Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii international conference on system sciences, Vol. 4, pp. 4029–4038.

  • Bartfai G. (1996). An ART-based modular architecture for learning hierarchical clusterings. Neurocomputing 13: 31–45

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Camarinha-Matos L.M., Afsarmanesh H. (2003). Elements of a base VE infrastructure. Computers in Industry 51: 139–163

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carpenter G.A., Grossberg S., Rosen D.B. (1991). Fuzzy ART: Fast stable learning and categorization of analog pattern by an adaptive resonance system. Neural Networks 4: 759–771

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Colucci S., Noia T.D., Sciascio E.D., Donini F.M., Mongiello M. (2005). Concept abduction and contraction for semantic-based discovery of matches and negotiation spaces in an e-marketplace. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 4: 345–361

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldman C.V., Rosenschein J.S. (2002). Evolutionary patterns of agent organizations. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part A 32: 135–148

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hishiyama, R., & Ishida, T. (2005). Modeling e-procurement as co-adaptive matchmaking with mutual relevance feedback. In: M. W. Barley & N. Kasabov (Eds.), PRIMA 2004, LNAI 3371 (pp. 67–80). Springer.

  • Huang J., Georgiopoulos M., Heileman G.L. (1995). Fuzzy ART properties. Neural Networks 8: 203–213

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ioerger, T. R. (2004). Reasoning about beliefs, observability, and information exchange in teamwork. In 17th International conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS’04).

  • ISO (1994). Application protocol: Configuration controlled design, IS 10303—Part 203.

  • Jeng, J. J., & Cheng, B. H. C. (1995). Specification matching for software reuse. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 20.

  • Jiang P., Mair Q., Newman J. (2006). The application of UML to the design of processes supporting product configuration management. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing 19: 393–407

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jiang, P., Peng, Y., Mair, Q., & Yuan, M. (2005). A variable-resolution virtual sensor in social behaviour networks. In H. Czap (Ed.), Self-organization and automatic informatics(I) (pp. 86–94). ISO Press.

  • Kopena, J., & Regli, W. C. (2003). DAMLJessKB: A tool for reasoning with the semantic web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 74–77.

  • Kuokka D., Harada L. (1996). Integrating information via matchmaking. Intelligent Information Systems 6: 261–279

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kurbel K., Loutchko I. (2005). A model for multi-lateral negotiations on an agent-based marketplace for personnel acquisition. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 4: 187–203

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee J., Liu K.F.R., Wang Y.C., Chiang W. (2004). Possibilistic Petri nets as a basis for agent service description language. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 144: 105–126

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liberatore P. (2000). The complexity of belief update. Artificial Intelligence 119: 141–190

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu H., Petrovic M., Jacobsen H. (2005). Efficient and scalable filtering of graph-based metadata. Journal of Web Semantics 3: 294–310

    Google Scholar 

  • Ludwig S.A., Reyhani S.M.S. (2005). Introduction of semantic matchmaking to grid computing. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 65: 1533–1541

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ludwig, S. A., Naylor, W., Padget, J., & Rana, O. F. (2005). Matchmaking support for mathematical web services. Proceedings of the UK e-science all hands meeting, Nottingham UK.

  • Ludwig S.A., Reyhani S.M.S. (2006). Semantic approach to service discovery in a Grid environment. Journal of Web Semantics 4: 1–13.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martinez M.T., Park K.H., Favrel J. (2001). Virtual enterprise: Organisation, evolution and control. International Journal of Production Economics 74: 225–238

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miao C.Y., Goh A., Miao Y., Yang Z.H. (2002). Agent that models, reasons and makes decisions. Knowledge-Based Systems 15: 302–211

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Missikoff, M., & Taglino, F. (2004). An ontology-based platform for semantic interoperability. Handbook on ontologies (pp. 617–634). Springer.

  • Noia, T. D., Sciascio, E. D., Donini, F. M., & Mongiello, M. (2003). A system for principled matchmaking in an electronic marketplace. In The twelfth international world wide web conference, Budapest, Hungary.

  • Norman T.J., Preece A., et al. (2004). Agent-based formation of virtual organizations. Knowledge-Based Systems 17: 103–111

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2003). Artificial intelligence: A modern approach (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

  • Saridis G.N. (1989). Analytical formulation of the principle of increasing precision with decreasing intelligence for intelligent machines. Automatica 25: 461–467

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shoham, Y. (1991). AGENT-0: A simple agent language and its interpreter. Proceedings of the ninth national conference on artificial intelligence, Anaheim, CA, Vol. 2, pp. 704–709.

  • Shoham Y. (1993). Agent-oriented programming. Artificial Intelligence 60: 51–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Subbu R., Sanderson A.C. (2004). Network-based distributed planning using coevolutionary agents: Architecture and evaluation. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part A 34: 257–269

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sycara K., Klusch M., Widoff S., Lu J. (1999). Dynamic service matchmaking among agents in open information environments. ACM SIGMOD Record 28: 47–53

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tektonidis, D., Bokma, A., Oatley, G., & Salampasis, M. (2005). Onar: An ontologies-based service oriented application integration framework. Interoperability of enterprise software and applications, Geneva, Switzerland.

  • Trastour D., Bartolini C., Preist C. (2003). Semantic web support for the business-to-business e-commerce pre-contractual lifecycle. Computer Networks 42: 661–673

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Unland R., Kirn S., Wanka U., Hare G., Abbas S. (1995). Aegis: Agent oriented organizations. Accting Mgmt & Info Tech 5: 139–162

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Williams J., Steele N. (2002). Difference, distance and similarity as a basis for fuzzy decision support based on prototypical decision classes. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 131: 35–46

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wooldridge, M. J., & Jennings, N. R. (Eds.) (1995). Intelligent agents: ECAI-94 workshop on agent theories, architectures, and languages. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

  • Yuan, M., Jiang, P., & Newman, J. (2005). An energy-driven social behaviour network architecture. In H. Czap, et al. (Eds.), Self-organization and automatic informatics(I) (pp. 77–85). ISO Press.

  • Zadeh L.A. (1965). Fuzzy sets. Information and Control 8: 338–353

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, University of Bradford, Bradford, BD7 1DP, UK

    Ping Jiang

  2. Department of Computing, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK

    Quentin Mair

  3. Systems Engineering Institute, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Zu-Ren Feng

Authors
  1. Ping Jiang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Quentin Mair
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zu-Ren Feng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ping Jiang.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Jiang, P., Mair, Q. & Feng, ZR. Agent alliance formation using ART-networks as agent belief models. J Intell Manuf 18, 433–448 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-007-0032-x

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10845-007-0032-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation