Coordination and Communication among Topic Specific Search Agents

In topic-specific search field, most researchers focus on the single agent how to crawl on the Web. However, we want to mainly discuss the coordination among multi-agent in topic-specific search engine in this paper. We divide the topic-specific search agents (TSSA) into two types: f-agent and c-agent. The former makes task plans, manages the c-agents as well as deals with the communications among TSSA, whereas the latter crawls on the Web for retrieving the relevant pages. We introduce the computational architecture of the two agents respectively, and explain the cooperation and competition among them in more detail. Based on the contract net protocol, a negotiation protocol is proposed to control the cooperation and competition among TSSA.