Integrating Agents into a Collaborative Knowledge-based System for Business Rules Consistency Management

Abstract

-Capitalization and reuse of expert knowledge are very important for the survival of an enterprise. This paper presents a collaborative approach that utilizes domain ontology and agents. Thanks to our knowledge formalizing process, we give to domain expert an opportunity to store different forms of retrieved knowledge from experiences, design rules, business rules, decision processes, etc. The ontology is built to support business rules management. The global architecture is mainly composed of agents such as Expert agent, Evaluator agent, Translator agent, Security agent and Supervisor agent. The Evaluator agent is at the heart of our functional architecture, its role is to detect the problems that may arise in the consistency management module and provides a solution to these problems in order to validate the accuracy of business rules. In addition, a Security agent is defined to handle both security aspects in rules modeling and multi-agent system. The proposed approach is different from the others in terms of the number of rule's inconsistencies which are detected and treated like contradiction, redundancy, invalid rules, domain violation and rules never applicable, the collaboration that is initiated among business experts and the guarantee of security of the business rules and all the agents which constitute our system. The developed collaborative system is applied in an industrial case study.

A knowledge-based model for managing the ontology evolution: case study of maintenance in SONATRACH

“…Apply an argumentative approach to ontology evolution and make a comparison between our previous algorithm [37] and the inference reasoner that is developed in Matentzoglu et al [13].…”

“…Another aspect that can be considered in our study is the fact that all domain experts and operators who work in SONATRACH AVAL have to collaborate in sessions Sad Houari and Taghezout [37]. The collaborative system we developed in the previous work is used to execute the major tasks of introducing business rules, editing and managing them.…”

“…The whole process needs to pass through several steps, from the introduction of the rule until the final storage in the rules base. The major steps of the methodological process are visualised in Figure 2 as follows [37,44,45].…”

Towards a knowledge-based probabilistic and context-aware social recommender system

“…Although the knowledge integrator is intended to be easily adapted for use with multiple geo-location data sources in a seamless manner, the prototype developed in this article has been validated using Google and Facebook’s geo-location data. The concept of social network, along with that of collaboration, in its broadest sense, has been extensively applied in knowledge management in a variety of domains such as business and software engineering domains [36–38].…”

Editor's Note

“…Sad Houari and Taghezout [10] describe a novel business rules management system that aims to efficiently capitalize experts' knowledge in small and medium enterprises. The solution includes a domain ontology and a multi-agent system.…”