Agent ontology interoperability approach for MAS negotiations in virtual enterprise

Abstract

In supply chain management, a Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a dynamic alliance of partner companies. Multi-agent systems (MAS) have been introduced to facilitate negotiations among VE members. From the perspective of knowledge management, heterogeneous VE members utilize different knowledge structures and terminologies in their representative agents. To encourage their collaborative coordination and realize mutual understanding, agent ontology interoperability should be reached. In this paper, an approach for semantic ontology matching is proposed to generate correspondences among heterogeneous ontologies embedded in MAS; additionally, an ontology correspondence generation and negotiation protocol is developed to realize agent ontology interoperability in MAS negotiations.