Knowledge and experience reuse through communication among competent (peer) agents

This article addresses an extension of the knowledge modeling approaches, namely to multi-agent systems where communication and coordination are necessary. We propose the notion of competent agent and define the basic capabilities of these agents for the extension to be effective. An agent is competent when it is capable of reasoning about its own competence and that of the other agents with which it cooperates in a given domain. In our framework, an agent has competence models of itself and of its acquaintances from which it can decide, for a specific problem to be solved, the type of cooperative activity it can request and from which agent. In this paper we focus on societies of peer agents, i.e. agents that are able to solve the same type of task but that may have different degrees of competence for specific problem ranges.Peer Reviewe