Information Fusion in a Cooperative Multi-agent System for Web Information Retrieval

As an attempt to solve some contemporary web information retrieval problems, a construction of a cooperative multiagent system is proposed. This paper introduces the system and presents the use of a unique aggregation and fusion technique that is employed to attain reliable delivery performance. The intelligent methodology to fuse agents’ decisions, the team consensus approach, models the interaction and bring a society into a consensus. After each agent in the group gathers information relevant to a user’s query, the group engages in an uncertainty estimation stage. This process allows each agent to assess its self-uncertainty and the conditional uncertainties of other agents. The procedure facilitates the computation of a weighting scheme that operates recursively on information collected by these agents until the group reaches a consensus. Whenever a new task is received, the uncertainty estimates of agents are updated and used to compute a new weighting scheme.