Ontology-Based Capability Management for Distributed Problem Solving in the Manufacturing Domain

Providing services within multiagent systems, an agent has to register itself with a distinct description of its main capabilities in yellow page services. If another agent is requesting to solve a specific task, it has to be decided whether or not the requested agent is capable of performing the task successfully. We are assuming that task requirements as well as capabilities are specified using ontologies. Decision is easy if the concepts of requested task requirements are directly mapping to concepts of provided capabilities. However, concept inequality may occur. Especially in production engineering with its increasing concern of knowledge about sophisticated manufacturing processes, relying on simple concept equality is not suitable to fulfill demands of current industrial applications. Thus, enhanced methods like ontology-based capability management presented in this paper have to be established to address this problem. For the case of indifferent concepts we are introducing a conflict-based approach for capability negotiation as well as an application scenario for this approach in the manufacturing domain.