Ontological Model for Exception Management in Open Multi-Agent Systems

One of the major issues in dealing with exceptions in open multi-agent systems (MAS) is lack of uniform representation of exceptions and their shared semantics. In the absence of a uniform framework different business organization may use different representations for the same exception or may interpret the same exception in different way. In order to address this issue we present an ontological approach to provide a uniform way of representing and interpreting exceptions in cross-organizational settings. This helps agents from different organizations to interpret exceptional situations in an unambiguous way and exchange exception related information using standard structures. We believe that exception ontology along with domain ontology increases the open MAS reliability and also enhances its fault tolerance capability.