A dynamically formed hierarchical agent organization for a distributed content sharing system

Abstract

The organization and collaborative protocols of agent societies are becoming increasingly important with the growing size of agent networks. Particularly, in a multi-agent based content sharing system, a flat, peer-to-peer (P2P) agent organization is not the most efficient organization for locating relevant agents for queries. This work develops and analyzes a hierarchical agent group formation protocol to build a hybrid organization for large-scale content sharing system as well as a content-aware distributed search algorithm to take advantage of such an organization. During the organization formation process, the agents manage their agent-view structures to form a hierarchical topology in an incremental fashion. The algorithm aims to place those agents with similar content in the same group. We evaluate the system performance based on TREC VLC 921 datasets. The results of the experiment demonstrate a significant increase in the cumulative recall ratio (CRR) measure compared to the flat agent organization and structure.