The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

In a simple cooperative MAS model where a collection of "querying agents" can send queries to a collection of "information agents", we formalize the problem of designing strategies so that the expected completion time of the queries is minimized, when every querying agent uses the same strategy. We devise a provably optimal strategy for the static case with no query arrivals, and show via simulations that the same strategy performs well when queries arrive with a certain probability. We also consider issues such as whether or not the expected completion time can be reduced by sending multiple copies of queries, or by aborting copies of answered queries.

Notes

Number of pages: 14

Text Reference

Prasad Chalasani, Somesh Jha, Onn Shehory, and Katia Sycara, "Strategies for Querying Information Agents," In Cooperative Information Agents II. Lecture Notes in AI, M. Klusch and G. Weiss, ed., 1998

BibTeX Reference

@incollection{Chalasani_1998_2568,
   author = "Prasad Chalasani and Somesh Jha and Onn Shehory and Katia Sycara",
   editor = "M. Klusch and G. Weiss",
   title = "Strategies for Querying Information Agents",
   booktitle = "In Cooperative Information Agents II. Lecture Notes in AI",
   year = "1998",
   volume = "1435",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu