A Hierarchical Agent-oriented Knowledge Model for Multi-Agent Systems

Software systems used in a business environment must consider knowledge about business processes, business rules, business terms, and their manageability, adaptability, and maintainability due to changing environment over time. In this paper, from a Software Engineering perspective, we propose hierarchical structure for business knowledge that is then made available to agents running in systems. Such knowledge is sourced from the business requirements and becomes a knowledge base of agents, the basis for agent behaviour. Because the knowledge is externalised from the system, system behaviour is easily maintained. As a result, the hierarchical agent-oriented knowledge model is advanced and advocated. The work extends the framework of Agent-Rule-Class (ARC) [2] and contributes a further development of the Adaptive Agent Model (AAM) [3] and is illustrated using the case of a rail track management system.