A Performance Evaluation of the Acorn

ACORN (Agent-based Community Oriented Retrieval Network) is a multi-agent system which uses agents to provide information across inter-net/intranet networks. In this report, we adapt the ACORN architecture for its performance evaluation on single and multiple servers, running on single and multiple machines. In order to evaluate the performance of ACORN, we introduce a novel concept of multiple autonomous virtual users. The concept of multiple autonomous virtual users and our testing philosophy is applicable to the performance evaluation of other client/server based multi-agent systems. The modiied ACORN architecture has been ported to diierent machines and experimental results on single processors obtained. The processing time required by ACORN is found to be a nonlinear function of the number of agents. 1.1 INTRODUCTION The explosive growth of the online information makes it increasingly diicult for users to locate and exploit the information available worldwide. Autonomous agents allow a radically new approach that makes information access easy and eecient. Rather than the user having to go and track down information (thèpull' model), the agents provide a unique ability to proole, target and help their customers. Information ltering algorithms, for example, automated collabora-tive ltering used in the Fireey products 2] and the artiicial neural networks (ANNs) used in the Autonomy products 1], are central to the development of intelligent agents that search the very large number of databases and compare the prooles of millions of users.