An efficient agent control method for information retrieval with time constraints

Multiagent systems for information retrieval over large-scale networks are considered an effective technology and have received much attention. In a typical case, such information retrieval has time constraints, since the network contains too much information. In this paper, we assume that each retrieval result can be scored and propose a method to control agent execution to improve the score of the result that each agent has acquired. This method terminates the agents that are less likely to be able to complete their tasks by a given deadline and/or to acquire the result of a higher score than that they have already obtained. Finally, simulation experiments show the excellent performance of the proposed method.