Information management for co-operative engineering

In this paper we describe how a set of autonomous computational agents can cooperate in providing coherent management of information in environments where there are many diverse information resources. The agents use models of themselves and of the resources that are local to them. Resource models may be the schemas of databases, frame systems of knowledge bases, or process models of business operations. Models enable the agents and resources to use the appropriate semantics when they inter-operate. This is accomplished by specifying the semantics in terms of a common ontology. We discuss the contents of the models, where they come from, and how the agents acquire them. We then describe a set of agents for telecommunication service provisioning and show how the agents use such models to co-operate. Their interactions produce an implementation of relaxed transaction processing.