Role of acquaintance models in agent's private and semi-private knowledge disclosure

The organizational architecture of the multi-agent systems and the structure of social knowledge that the members of the community administer are critical factors for assuring such patterns of information exchange that keep agents private knowledge confidential. In this paper we will introduce the concept of agents’ private and semi-private knowledge and we will explain the difference between the alliance – a semi-permanent organizational structure and a coalition – a goal-oriented, non-permanent organizational structure. We will provide the reader with an analysis on how does the agents’ social knowledge, stored in the tri-base acquaintance model, contributes to permanent confidentiality of agents’ private knowledge, preferences, decision making models, resources, etc. The study has been experimentally verified in the domain of planning for humanitarian relief operations within a high number of hardly collaborating and vaguely linked nongovernmental organizations is a challenging problem. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.