Title: Speeding-up information retrieval with the employment of a multi-agent system

Authors: Irene Sygkouna, Miltiades E. Anagnostou

Addresses: Computer Networks Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 9, Heroon Polytechneiou Str., 15773, Zografou, Athens, Greece. ' Computer Networks Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 9, Heroon Polytechneiou Str., 15773, Zografou, Athens, Greece

Abstract: This paper focuses on Mobile Agents (MAs) and their use for information retrieval. A multi-agent system is considered; a number of agents are involved in a cooperative effort to retrieve distributed data from network nodes. Our objective is to find the routes of the agents so that the total completion time is minimised. The system design goal of producing an |optimal| answer with minimal use of communication and processing resources is the driving reason for testing three heuristic algorithms. Our endmost goal is to achieve an |acceptable| answer using a |reasonable| amount of communication resources.

Keywords: information retrieval; mobile agents; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; optimisation; total completion time.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWMC.2010.034220

International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing, 2010 Vol.4 No.3, pp.210 - 217

Published online: 28 Jul 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article