This paper describes the methodology used in the Enterprise Integration Laboratory for the design and evaluation of integrated ontologies, including the proposal of new ontologies and the extension of existing ontologies (see Figure 1). We illustrate these ideas with examples from our activity and organisation ontologies. 2 Motivating Scenarios

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale, organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualisation, design and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our sys...

This paper describes our ongoing R&D effort in developing a replicable, Web-based negotiation server to conduct bargaining-type negotiations between clients (i.e., buyers and sellers) in e-commerce. Multiple copies of this server can be paired with existing Web-servers to provide negotiation capabilities. Each client can select a trusted negotiation server to represent his/her interests. Web-based GUI tools are used by clients in a build-time registration process to specify the requirements, constraints, negotiation strategic rules, and preference scoring methods related to the buying or selling of a product. The registration information is used by the negotiation servers to conduct negotiations automatically on behalf of the clients. In this paper, we present the architecture of the negotiation server and the framework for automated negotiations, and describe a number of communication primitives, which make up the negotiation protocol. We have developed a constraint satisfaction processor (CSP) to evaluate a negotiation proposal against the registered constraints. An Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) server manages events and triggers the execution of strategic rules, which may relax constraints, notify clients, or perform other operations. Strategic rules can be added and modified at run-time to deal with the dynamic nature of negotiations. A cost-benefit analysis performs quantitative analysis of alternative negotiation conditions. We have implemented a prototype system to demonstrate automated negotiations among buyers and suppliers in a supply chain management system.

. The problem of modelling air missions is part of a larger problem - simulating possible war-like scenarios in the air, sea, and on land. In modelling such military systems one is required to model the behaviour of various actors and the resources that are available to them. One aspect of this problem is the modelling of a group of actors as a team and then modelling the coordinated behaviour of such a team to achieve a joint goal. In the domain of air mission modelling the actors are pilots who control aircraft and their behaviour is referred to as tactics. In this paper we present the approach we adopted in modelling teams and team tactics as part of the development of the Smart Whole AiR Mission Model (SWARMM) for the Air Operations Division of the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organization. In our approach teams are composed of sub-teams and adopt organizational structures. Such structures define the responsibilities of the sub-teams towards the mission to be achieved...

In recent years, researchers in Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) have been concentrating on describing and modeling autonomous agents for multi-agent worlds and designing algorithms and protocols that will enable the agents to cooperate. Different aspects of this problem have been addressed and various solutions have been suggested. In this paper we introduce the notion of a team-oriented programming language. This language incorporates the different aspects of specifying a multi-agent system into an integrated unit. We extend our previous work by introducing the concept of a social structure and describe its effect on representing teams and their behavior. We also describe a preliminary example of a team-oriented programming language. This language enables the designer of a system to specify the system's behavior (also referred to as team behavior) and various types of social structures and inter-team relationships. We define the language used by an agent to describe its worl...

this paper, we present enterprise modelling as a new area of application for theoretical work in reasoning about action. We give an overview of the problems encountered in enterprise modelling and the requirements that they impose on any theory of action. We outline our approach to these problems using an extension to the situation calculus.

The case-based retrieval is frequently reported as a valuable tool for engineering design. We discuss similarity based retrieval in the engineering design domain when the context is given as a set of constraints. This approach comprises the lowest level with which we support case-based retrieval from our Integrated Knowledge-Base. The characterization of the retrieval process yields a robust compliance measure and a similarity measure for the cases in a given context. The problematic concept of context is taken up front by making it an explicit part of the query.

The problem of whole air mission modelling is part of a larger problem which is the problem of simulating possible war-like scenarios in the air, sea, and on land. In such modelling systems one is required to model the behaviour of various actors and the resources that are available to them. One aspect of this problem is the modelling of a group of actors as a team and then modelling the coordinated behaviour of such a team to achieve a joint goal. In the domain of air mission modelling the actors are pilots that control aircraft and their behaviour is referred to as tactics. In this paper we present the approach we adopted in modelling teams and team tactics as part of the development of the Smart Whole AiR Mission Model (SWARMM) for the DSTO, Air Operations Division. 1 Introduction Modelling the behaviour of teams is a problem that concerns many analysts who are attempting to model the behaviours of groups of humans and also concerns researchers in Distributed Artificial Intellige...

this paper, we introduce ConceptBase a knowledge representation tool used for the integration of the three formalisms (see Sect. 2). Then in Sect. 3, we present the Albert II formal language which is the core of the framework. The i* concepts are browsed through in Sect. 4 and the integration with Albert II is sketched. Finally, a description of CIMOSA and its integration with the other formalisms are given in Sect. 5. The goal of this paper is not to present the three formalisms used in the framework in an exhaustive way but rather to show the principles and benefits of their integration within ConceptBase. 2. The ConceptBase Tool

Enterprise design knowledge is currently descriptive, ad hoc, or pre-scientific. One reason for this state of affairs in enterprise design is that existing approaches lack an adequate specification of the terminology of the enterprise models, which leads to inconsistent interpretation and uses of knowledge. We use the formal enterprise models being developed as part of the Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project to provide a precise specification of enterprise structure, and use this structure to characterize process integration within the enterprise. We then use the constraints within the enterprise model to define a special class of enterprises, and discuss the concepts necessary to characterize process integration within this class. The results of this paper arose out of the successful application of these ontologies to the analysis of the IBM Opportunity Management Process in a joint project with IBM Canada.