Requirements and initial model for KnowLang: a language for knowledge representation in autonomic service-component ensembles

Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles (ASCENS) is a class of multi-agent systems formed as mobile, intelligent and openended swarms of special autonomic service components capable of local and distributed reasoning. Such components encapsulate rules, constraints and mechanisms for self-adaptation and acquire and process knowledge about themselves, other service components and their environment. ASCENS systems pose distinct challenges for knowledge representation languages. In this paper, we present requirements and an initial model for such a language called KnowLang. KnowLang is intended to provide for formal specification of distinct knowledge models each representing a different knowledge domain of an ASCENS system, such as the internal world of a service component, the world of a service-component ensemble, the surrounding external world and information of special situations related to state changes and operations of service components. KnowLang provides the necessary constructs and mechanisms for specifying such knowledge models at two main levels – an ontology level and a logic-foundations level, where the latter is formed by special facts, rules, constraints and inter-ontology operators. In this paper, we also survey one of the ASCENS case studies to derive some of the requirements for KnowLang.