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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
A.W. Marshall and I. Olkin. Inequalities: theory of majorization and its applications. Academic Press, 1979.
F. Baccelli, Z. Liu, and D. Towsley. Extremal scheduling of parallel processing systems with and without real-time constraints. Journal of the ACM, 40:1209–1237, 1993.
E. Beckenbach. Inequalities. Springer-Verlag, 1965.
P. Chalasani, S. Jha, O. Shehory, and K. Sycara. Query restart strategies for web agents. In Autonomous Agents, 1997. Submitted.
C. Chang and D. Yao. Rearrangement, majorization and stochastic scheduling. Technical Report IBM RC 16250 (#72136), IBM, Nov 1990.
E. Coffman and Z. Liu. On the optimal stochastic scheduling of out-forests. Operations Research, 40:S67–S75, 1992.
D. Duffie. Security Markets: Stochastic Models. Academic Press, 1988.
G. Hardin. The tragey of the commons. Science, 162:1243–1248, 1968.
G. Hardy, J. Littlewood, and G. Polya. Inequalities. Cambridge University Press, 1934.
B. Huberman, R. Lukose, and T. Hogg. An economics approach to hard computational problems. Science, 275:51–54, 1997.
B. A. Huberman and R. M. Lukose. Social dilemmas and internet congestion. Science, 277:535–537, July 25 1997.
J.K. MacKie-Mason and H.R. Varian. Some economics of the internet. In Proc. 10th Michigan Public Utility Conf., 1993.
R. Lukose and B. Huberman. A methodology for managing risk in electronic transactions over the internet. In 3rd Int. conf. computational economics, 1997.
J. MacKie-Mason and H. Varian. Pricing the internet. In B. Kahin and J. Keller, editors, Public access to the internet. MIT Press, 1995.
T. Mullen and M. Wellman. A simple computational market for network information services. In Proc. first Int. Conf. on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), 1995.
O.Etzioni, S. Hanks, T. Jiang, R. Kark, O. Madani, and O. Waarts. Efficient information gathering on the internet. In Proc. Foundations of Comp. Sc., 1996.
D. Stahl, A. Gupta, and A. Whinston. Pricing of services in the internet. Technical report, University of Texas at Austin, 1995.
H. Varian. Economic mechanism design for computerized agents. In USENIX Workshop on Electronic Conference, New York, July 1995.
M. Wellman. A market-oriented programming environment and its application to distributed multicommodity flow problems. J. Artificial Intelligence, 1:1–23, 1993.
M. Wellman. The economic approach to artificial intelligence. ACM Computing Surveys Symp. on Artif. Intell., 27(3), 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chalasani, P., Jha, S., Shehory, O., Sycara, K. (1998). Strategies for querying information agents. In: Klusch, M., Weiß, G. (eds) Cooperative Information Agents II Learning, Mobility and Electronic Commerce for Information Discovery on the Internet. CIA 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1435. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053677
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053677
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64676-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69109-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive