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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

With the explosive growth of the internet, autonomous agents will increasingly need strategies for efficiently retrieving information. The time an agent (or server) takes to answer a query issued to it is often a random variable, whose distribution can be estimated by collecting statistics. When an agent A sends a query to another agent B and the query has not completed in some period of time, agent A faces the dilemma of whether to continue waiting or reissue the query (to agent B or to a different one). When some information is available about the probability distribution of the query completion time of the agents, it is possible to devise schemes for agents to reissue queries in such a way that the expected query completion time is reduced significantly. We design such schemes for various models of query-answering agents. Where meaningful, we take into account the cost of sending a query to an agent.

Notes

Sponsor: ONR Grant #N-00014-96-1-1222, NSF Grant IRI-9612131 and IRI-9712607

Text Reference

Prasad Chalasani, Somesh Jha, Onn Shehory, and Katia Sycara, "Query restart strategies for web agents," Autonomous Agents, May, 1998, pp. 124-131.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Chalasani_1998_1314,
   author = "Prasad Chalasani and Somesh Jha and Onn Shehory and Katia Sycara",
   title = "Query restart strategies for web agents",
   booktitle = "Autonomous Agents",
   pages = "124-131",
   month = "May",
   year = "1998",
}

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