Bio-medical Ontologies Maintenance and Change Management

290 M. Hadzic, M. Chen, and R. Brouwer
(2) Service. The multi-agent system is composed of various agents with different
but complementary capabilities. The expertise complementarity is a
feature that holds the agent society together. Agents are dependant on each
other for mutually beneficial actions and accomplishing goals of the overall
system. The agents should be able to work together and provide service to
one another. The agents that refuse to collaborate should be replaced by
agents willing to provide service to others.
(3) Commitment. The agents of the system must be completely committed to
the overall goal and purpose of the multi-agent system. Some agents may
be partially committed and reliance on such agents may be risky. In worst
cases, agents may commit to the overall goals and purposes of other malicious
multi-agent systems and turn against the multi-agent system they
were originally created to work for.
The nine identified properties are critical inside as well as outside the multiagent
system, such as during the interaction of the multi-agent system with the
environment. It is necessary to effectively address these issues and efficiently implement
them within the multi-agent system. In our multi-agent system, all nine
requirements must be addressed. For example, in regard to the integrity requirement,
the information provided to the Intelligent agent by the Information agents
should be identical to the information found in the information resource from
which this information was retrieved. In the same way, information provided to
the Interface agent by the Intelligent agents should be identical to the information
found in the database (as well as the information found in the original information
resource). In analogous way we can address other security requirements.
4.5 Assemble Individual Agents
We have discussed different functions and types of agents, their intelligence, system
architecture and security requirements that must be addressed within the system.
In this step we bring the different aspects together and create the different
agents defined by the previous steps.
It is important for each agent to identify required agent components, design the
components and assemble them into an unified system i.e. individual agent. For
example, these agent components may be Human Interface (to enable interaction
with users e.g. interaction between Interface agent and users), Agent Interface (to
enable interaction with other agents e.g. interaction between Interface & Intelligent
agents and Intelligent & Information agents), Communication component (to
enable exchanging and processing messages during agent’s interactions), Task
component (to enable the agents to perform tasks assigned to them), Domain
component (Total Wellbeing Ontology), Environment knowledge (to describe environment
in which the agents perform their functions), History files (past experiences
of agents), and so on.
It is possible that to achieve variety of agents within a multi-agent in three different
ways:
(1) using same components but changing the content of these components
(2) changing combination of the used components
(3) changing both content and combination of the used components.