Role of Acquaintance Models in Agent-Based Production Planning System

This paper comments the role of acquaintance models in agent-based engineering solutions. We present a specific methodology,a tri-base acquaintance model, as formal model of agents’ mutual awareness. The model contains three separate knowledge structures for representing agents’ permanent, semi-permanent and temporary knowledge, respectively, and mechanism for administering, maintenance and exploration of the knowledge. The paper explains how utilisation of an acquaintance model contributes to communication savings and to reduction of overall distributed problem solving complexity. Utilisation of the tri-base acquaintance model is illustrated on ProPlanT multi-agent system for project-oriented production planning. The system architecture exploits several differenttypes of agents exploring the tri-base mechanism including the meta-agents who are used to adjust and tune the agents’ acquaintance models.