Computer Sciences Seminar
Thursday, February 28
12:30 PM, NAC 8/206

Enabling Agents in E-Business

Yannis Labrou
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Abstract
We define e-business as the discovery, procurement and sourcing of goods and services, over computer networks and within, but especially across, the boundaries of business units and enterprises. During the early days of agent hype (only 6-7 years ago) researchers and practitioners were pre-occupied with identifying the "killer app" for agents but today we accept (a) that agents represent a system-building paradigm that emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, and cooperation, both at design time and runtime and (b) that particular application areas introduce specific requirements and obstacles to the engineering of agent systems. The complex and heterogeneous universe of e-business presents plenty of opportunities for the deployment of agent applications, but also requires many building blocks.

This presentation outlines two building blocks for engineering agent systems in general, and for e-business applications in particular: (a) a language for agents to communicate knowledge and to enable complex agent interactions and (b) a language for expressing knowledge relevant to e-business. An Agent Communication Language (ACL) is a foundational component of complex agent systems. We will briefly outline contributions to the specification, semantics and protocols of Knowledge Query & Manipulation Language (KQML), the first ACL. KQML has enjoyed widespread use and has influenced the work of the Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA), which is an international standardization organization tasked with the specification of the standards necessary for the development of complex agent applications. An ACL provides the framework for supporting interactions between agents but we also need to capture the knowledge that communicating agents may exchange is e-business scenarios. We thus target the representation of business rules for expressing contracts, product & service offerings, business processes, etc. with the goal of supporting shared understanding and interoperability at both the representational and implementational layers. The proposed knowledge representation formalism is a generalized version of Courteous Logic Programs (CLP), which expressively extends declarative ordinary logic programs (OLP) to include prioritized conflict handling. The XML encoding of CLP, called Business Rules Markup Language (BRML) is suitable for interchange between heterogeneous commercial rule languages and for integration into XML-encoded ACL messages and eventually into the larger "web of meaning" ("semantic web") of interconnected information and knowledge sources. We also present examples of using those building blocks for agent applications in supply chain scenarios.

The presentation will conclude with some insights on the implementational challenges of building agent systems in the "real" world of enterprise software and e-business.

Bio
Dr. Yannis Labrou served as the Director of Technology of PowerMarket Inc., an enterprise software, start-up company in Belmont, CA. Prior to joining PowerMarket, Labrou was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and at the Institute for Global Electronic Commerce (IGEC) at UMBC. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UMBC and a Diploma in Physics from the University of Athens, Greece. Dr. Labrou's research focuses on software agents and their applications, especially in e-business and supply chain management. Dr. Labrou is a founding member of the FIPA Academy and has been an active participant in the development of the FIPA specifications for software agents standards and an instrumental contributor to KQML, the first high-level language for agent communication. He is the author of more than 30 publications in research journals, books, and conferences. Before joining UMBC, Dr. Labrou worked as an intern at the Intelligent Network Technology group of the I.B.M. T.J. Watson Research Center.