Conceptual Structures for Reasoning Enterprise Agents

If agents are to facilitate interoperability at the knowledge level, they must be able to implement plans in response to what they perceive about their own environment, together with any future intentions. As potential business risk-takers, enterprise agents must be able to take advantage of new scenarios by understanding the ontologies of other enterprises. Conceptual Structures such as Conceptual Graphs (CG) are a more natural way of expressing business transactions. Coupled with the Belief, Desire and Intention (BDI) model, the Transaction Model (TM), expressesd as CG, is used as part of an agent’s model for reasoning on a particular course of action. A brief exemplar illustrates how a reasoning Multi-Agent System application, governed by the Transaction Model, can be implemented using Transaction Agent Modelling (TrAM) and tools such as Amine, Jason and JADE.