An Interoperable Knowledge – based Framework for Negotiating Semantic Web Agents

This project proposal is about the design and development of a flexible multi-agent system able to support multiple agent negotiation scenarios offering interoperation among agents. The development of this system will be based on an extension of an existing system, called EMERALD, which is knowledge-based multi-agent system featuring trusted, third party reasoning services, reusable agent prototypes for agent behaviour and mechanisms for ensuring trust in the environment. This project will add value to the existing system by doing the following:

• Form a generic environment for agents interacting in the SW (cooperation, negotiation, coordination).
• Add more reasoning services by including a variety of popular inference services that will conform to various types of logics.
• Extend and upgrade the existing agent prototype.
• Adopt, design and develop more trust mechanisms
• Built user interfaces to handle specific issues, such as trust testing, and controlling the final application. The interface can be either a locally installed software on the user’s computer or a web-based application for using the system remotely.
• Design, develop and test a variety of agent negotiation services. A negotiation service will be responsible with hosting a negotiation and coordination of negotiation participants. A negotiation service will use a declarative specification of the negotiation mechanism. Tests will be performed in the area of auctions.
• Design, develop and test several knowledge-based negotiation agents that use negotiation services for carrying out negotiation tasks in order to meet their design objects. Knowledge-based negotiation agents will use various EMERALD reasoning services for reasoning about the negotiation mechanism and for tuning their negotiation strategies.

Partners

• Intelligent Systems group, Dept. of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
  • Associate Prof. Nick Bassiliades
  • Kalliopi Kravari
  • Georgios Meditskos
  • Prof. I. Vlahavas
• Intelligent Distributed Systems Group, Software Engineering Department, Faculty of Automatics, Computers and Electronics, University of Craiova, Romania
  • Costin Badica
  • Amelia Badica
  • Elvira Popescu
  • Mihnea Scafes
  • Sorin Ilie
  • Alex Muscar