International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289

The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)

A Market-oriented Agents-based Model for Information Retrieval

Djamel Eddine MENACER1, Christophe SIBERTIN-BLANC2, Habiba DRIAS3
1

National Computer Science School of Algiers (ESI)

Algiers, Algeria.
2
Universit Toulouse 1 - Capitole
Toulouse, France
3
Houari Boumedienne Sciences and Technologies University of Algiers (USTHB)
Algiers, Algeria
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

ABSTRACT
Information Retrieval in the World Wide Web
(Web IR) is essential for a number of activities
and it is an active domain of research and development. The main challenges concern the relevance of the results provided to users' queries
and the performance regarding respond-time. On
the other hand, agent-based market systems
prove to be efficient for implementing ecommerce or B2B applications on the internet,
thanks to inherent properties such as prominency
of interactions, scalability, flexibility, interoperability, etc. Although the use of agents in other
application domains is not yet widespread, the
integration of mobile agents into market mechanisms bring clear and efficient solutions to Quality of Service issues encountered in most distributed applications and notably in Web IR
systems. Mobility allows defining the seller
buyer model of interaction, where agents act on
behalf of final users or devices providing resources, while the generic Market Place architecture provides an organizational setting for the
matching of demands and offers. The paper
shows how this framework applies to Web IR
and provides experimental validation results
from a Jade implementation

KEYWORDS
Agents, Mobile Agent, Information Retrieval, Seller
Buyer model, Market Place Architecture, Jade.

1 INTRODUCTION
Most of the current systems for locating information on the World Wide Web, known as
Web Information Retrieval systems (Web IR),
rely on the use of search engines which manage

and attempt to keep up-to-date indexing information by a variety of tools based on spiders,
web crawlers, etc [1]. These engines are then
queried by users to locate and find information
on particular topics.
The main issue in IR systems is to quickly return the relevant information to end-users. The
relevance and the performance become then the
most important requirements in IR systems. In
order to optimize the relevance, many approaches have been proposed, such as the personalization of requests [2] and the semantic Web [3].
However, these approaches are not yet feasible
because they are hard to implement.
The use of centralized engines in IR systems
is a drawback that creates bottlenecks in the
search for locating information. The growing
size of the information to be indexed and the
processing power required to serve search requests jeopardize the suitability of the search engines technology to meet the needs. At any moment, a given search engine is estimated to cover
no more than 40% of the web in its database [1].
To perform an exhaustive search, the user must
employ several search engines and assume that
each one has access to a different 40% part. To
avoid the bottleneck problem, indexes need to be
distributed.
In [4], the authors suggest, as a possible
means for achieving this end, to use mobile
agents that wander across the web in a directed
fashion for seeking the information on behalf of
users. The proposed scheme, called AgentSeek
system, involves three types of mobile agents:
- ferrets which act on behalf of web searcher users, seek for information providers

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
and advertise the location of information
consumers
- publicists which act on behalf of web site
creators (people providing information),
advertise the location of information providers and seek information consumers
- gurus which facilitate encounters between
ferrets and publicists
However, the proposed scheme uses specific
concepts, ferrets, gurus and publicists that cannot be applied to other systems.
NetSA [5] is a multi-agents system for the IR
on heterogeneous distributed sources. This system comprises essentially the following agents:
- User agents that collect and filter information from and to the clients
- Broker agents that associate the requests
to agents which are able to respond to
them
- Resources agents, which are linked to an
information resource (internal or external)
and are able to update the data

uted e-Health applications. More precisely, they

describe experiences based on this technology
concerning emergency scenarios. The authors
show that the use of mobile agents in Medical
Information Retrieval in Mass Casualty Scene is
very beneficial in terms of performance.
In [9], the authors argue that one of the best
means for getting services or finding particular
information on a network is the use of Jade mobile agents [10] together with a Web interface
that connects users and resources in a transparent, open and scalable way. The authors argue
that the deployment of Jade agents eases the development of applications thanks to its open
source-code, interoperability with other agents,
availability and easiness to use.

Calvin [6] is a multi-agents system that provides the following agents:

- Calvin Web, an interface agent;
- Analysis agents (TFIDF, WordSieve and
DocStats) that perform analysis of the users profile and behavior;
- Research Agents (AltaBot and GoogleBot)
that perform profile-based searches for the
users.

In line with these technical proposals, the paper proposes a novel integrated mobile agentbased approach for IR in the WWW.
The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 outlines our proposition based
upon mobile agents and market-oriented interaction model. Section 3 describes a new mobile
agents model, the seller buyer model, while
section 4 describes its implementation through a
generic mobile agents-based framework, the
Market - Place architecture. Section 5 presents
how to perform IR tasks by means of market
mechanisms and how to apply the MP architecture to IR applications. Section 6 presents the
MP-IR platform, a jade implementation of the
framework and section 7 provides an experimental validation. Finally, section 8 concludes
the whole paper.

The Calvin system is also a static multi-agent

system.

2 MOBILE AGENTS FOR WEB

INFORMATIONN RETRIEVAL

In [7], an interesting study suggests a components-based approach including mobile agents in

order to simplify the development and the deployment of adaptable information retrieval systems in the context of distributed heterogeneous
peer-to-peer networks. This promising proposal
uses mobile agents as a solution to the deployment problem.

The importance of the quality of service (QoS)

in distributed applications (non functional aspect) is becoming critical. The quality of service
includes non functional aspects such as [11]: the
performance, the security and the safety of functioning (or reliability). The QoS depends also on
the distributed application.

However, the NetSA system is a static multiagent system.

In [8], the authors discuss the use of mobile

agent technology as an enabler for open distrib-

In Information Retrieval (IR), the performance

should be more important than security and reli-

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
ability. The performance can be measured by the
relevance and the response time.

a received agent. There is no complete security solution to this kind of attacks.

In order to improve the performance in IR, we

should give answer to the two main issues regarding IR systems:
Using distributed indexes instead of a centralized index
Improve the relevance

A MA needs a specific execution environment

on each of the sites that constitute its itinerary.
The execution environment is provided by a MA
platform. Another issue in using MA is the need
of similar MA platforms in each node in the
network. Hence, many efforts are made to provide interoperability between MA platforms:
FIPA [12] and MASIF [13] are the two most
known standards.

In order to distribute indexes, we can use

agents provided with the mobility capability.
Each agent may convey one index. Moreover,
the users requests can also be conveyed by mobile agents which can act on behalf of users.
In order to improve the relevance, we propose
to generalize the market interactions paradigm,
which proves its suitability in market applications such as e-commerce, to non-market applications such as IR. In market applications, a set
of services or goods is proposed by servers and
requested by client users. A client agent is delegated by a user to look for the location and
availability of a service (so-called a buyer-agent)
while a server agent is delegated by remote services to sell a service (so-called a seller-agent).
A seller-agent is intended to propose items or
services to buyer-agents. Both agents interact
according market mechanisms, such as negotiation and competition, in order to achieve the intended service.
Mobile Agents (MA) are software agents [11]
with the feature of mobility. The MA can be
used in distributed applications to reduce the
bandwidth consumption in the network and allow disconnected operations. MA represent a
good idea to implement IR applications. However, the security problem blocks their development. Indeed, MA is target to two types of security threats:
Attacks during the migration (on the network), also called exogenous attacks. This
kind of attacks can be solved by traditional
security means.
Attacks within the host that receive the
MA. This is known as endogenous attacks.
This kind of attack lies on the possible existence of malicious hosts that can tamper

Therefore, if we use MA in Web IR, we must

take into consideration to the following issues:
Security issue in MA
Interoperability between MA platforms
The security of MA is an important concern. In
IR systems, security is not required as QoS. In
our proposition, agents should convey users only requests and indexes. Therefore, the security
of agents is not a critical issue in agents-based
IR systems.
Finally, our proposition should be independent
of the MA-platforms standard (FIPA or
MASIF) used in the nodes of the network (Internet for example).

3 THE SELLER BUYER MODEL

MA are a good way to implement distributed
applications. However, a direct use of MA is not
recommended due to their security and interoperability issues. To avoid these issues, we have
built an extended Mobile Agent (MA) model
towards a more suitable model, the Seller-Buyer
model (SB) [14].
In SB, there are two kinds of MA: buyeragents and seller-agents. Both agents have just to
meet on dedicated sites called market places
(MP). In a MP, a buyer agent can meet several
seller agents that offer similar service.
In this scheme, a buyer agent should visit multiple MP (in order to optimize its satisfaction),
thus it must be mobile. Selling a service does not
require mobility but a seller agent must move in
the two following situations:

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
-

At the creation of the agent, it must migrate on an appropriate place.

When the current place becomes less profitable, the seller agent should migrate to a
more profitable place.

Provider site

Client site
Agent mobile

Endogenous Attacks
Exogenous Attacks

(a)

Agent mobile

Attacks by agents and other

network entities

Masquerading Attacks

MP
Buyer Mobile
agent

Migration
Return

Client site

Seller Mobile
agent

Migration

Provider
site

Client site
Buyer Mobile
agent

Buyer Mobile
agent

Negotiation

Negotiation

Seller Mobile
agent

Server site

Competition

Buyer
agent

Buyer
agent

Seller
agent

Attacks by agents and other

network entities

Seller Mobile
agent

Market place

Seller
agent

(b)

Fig. 2. Improvement of the MA (a) security by the SB model (b)

Fig. 1. The seller-buyer model

3.2 The SB model for multi-agents systems

In SB, both client and server processes are mobile. This is called service mobility. Figure 1
shows an overview of the SB model.
Finally, seller agents should only carry the minimum resources from their providers. In order
to complete the service rendering, seller agents
can run remote invocations with their providers.
This is the key of service mobility in SB.
3.1 Security in the SB model
In the SB model, the security model is based
upon trust. Mobile agents should move only to
trusted nodes. This is done by preventing an
agent from migrating directly to a host and a
host from receiving mobile agents. This is possible if we dissociate the rendering of services and
the hosting of visiting agents; in fact, a mobile
agent (buyer agent) representing the client
meets, on trusted sites (market places), a service
provider representative (the seller agent). Mobile
agents (buyer and seller) may migrate only on
market places.
Although our proposition does not require security, the SB model allows reducing the security
issues in the MA model, by removing the endogenous attacks as shown in the figure 2. A complete survey of the security in SB model is presented in [15].

The SB interaction model extends market

mechanisms to distributed systems. Buyer agents
perform negotiation with seller agents in the MP
so that the seller agents are in competition. The
negotiation is based upon a price p that can be
the QoS of the requested service. Facilitator
agents are used to ease the migration of MA.
Figure 3 shows the different interactions within a
SB multi-agents system.
Procedure negotiation (p=QoS)
For each visited MP
1. Send CFP to seller agents agents
2. Perform reverse auction to selected agents by the CFP
3. Choose the best agents
Next MP

Client site

Migration
Facilitator
agent

Buyer agent

Market place
Seller agent

Procedure request migration (S, Itinerary)

Request services base (S, MP list)
Interroger base stratgique (MP list, Itinerary)

Buyer agent

Facilitator
agent

Seller agent

Seller agent

Server site
Migration
Facilitator
agent

Seller agent

Procedure locate sellers (S, SA list)

Request directory (S, SA list)

Fig. 3. The SB multi-agents system

4 THE SB MODEL FOR

DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS:
THE MP ARCHITECTURE
We now propose a general framework based
upon the SB model for the development of mobile agents-based distributed applications. We
will call this framework the MP (Market - Place)
architecture. This architecture addresses the following objectives:
to provide a general multi-agents framework based upon the SB model, regardless
of the agent platforms used to manage
agents
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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
to provide mobile agents with a protection
based upon trust
to distribute the provided services by
means of seller agents
to provide acceptable level of QoS by
market interaction between agents
4.1 MP Components
There are two external actors considered by
the MP architecture: clients that send requests by
means of buyer mobile agents and providers that
offer services at MP by means of seller mobile
agents. The basic idea is that each service S in a
MP system belongs to a class of services SC and
each class of services SC belongs to an application domain D (see figure 4).
Place de march

Service Classes

Eshop

Services

Type Service

The MP architecture consists of several components as shown in the figure 5:

Shop

Eshops

Market places

Agents Negotiation

Agent Service Providers (ASP). This site

is responsible for the creation of mobile
buyers or seller agents, according to the
type of user (client or provider). We refer
this site to as Agent Service Provider
(ASP) [16].

MP Name Servers (MPNS). When a mobile agent requests or offers a service S

that belongs to the class SC, it searches
MP providing the class SC. To do this, the
agent sends a request to MP Name Servers
(MPNS). The answer is a list of MP that
offers the class of service SC, constituting
the itinerary of the agent.

Trust and Security Authorities (TSA). A

mobile agent must be certified before it
visits MPs. We propose to add PKI (Public
Key Infrastructure) components [17] to the
architecture. The ASP provides a pair of
keys (private, public) to mobile agents by
means of a cryptography service. The PKI
certification authorities are hosted in sites
called Trust and Security Authority (TSA).

Domaine

Fig. 4. Class diagram of the service organization in MP architecture

Catalog

shops. The information on e-shops and

services are stored in directory services
provided by the MPDS (MP Directory
Services) managed by the MPSM (MP
Service Manager). Each MP is protected
by a firewall called MPSS (MP Security
Service).

MP

MPNS
MP services Localisation

MPDS
Directory

MP
Archirecture

ASP
Entry Point
Agents Creation

TSA
PKI
Authorities

MPSS
Agent Firewall

Clients

Providers

Fig. 5. Overview of the MP architecture

Market places (MP). In order to give

mobile agents a directed way to request a
service, the MPs are organized according
to the class of the offered services. One
MP hosts one service class. The services
are located, within the MP, in e-shops
[16]. Each e-shop hosts one service.
Therefore, the dialogue between buyer
agents and seller agents takes place in e-

4.2 The dynamics of the MP architecture

Each request of a client user is associated to a
specific service S that belongs to a service class
SC. This request is linked to a buyer mobile
agent created in the ASP site. Before migrating,
the buyer agent asks the MPNS for an itinerary
for the SC class of service. The buyer agent obtains its private and public keys from a local
cryptographic service. The buyer agent registers
to the TSA by its public key and obtains a certificate. Almost the same process is applied to the
seller agents that represent providers. We can
represent the dynamics of the MP architecture
through the diagram shown in figure 6.

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The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
C

Clients

Providers

Subscription-request/response

MPi

Subscription-service

ASP

2: Grant
FAi

Cryptographic
service

Itinerary

MA2

MA1

Fai+1

MA1

MA3

4: Move

Fig. 8. The global migration of agents

Return of
Buyer agent
Certificat
With results

Certificat

MPNS

1: Move-request

ASP

Cryptographic
service

Itinerary

MPi+1
3: Notify

MPNS

TSA
Migration
Buyer agent
Step i

CA

Migration
Seller agents

MP(Sci)

MP(Scj)
Migration
Buyer agent
Step j

MPDS

Eshop
Si1

Eshop
Si2

MPSM

MPSS

MPSS

MPSM

Eshop
Si3

MPDS

Eshop
Sj1

Eshop
Sj2

Eshop
Sj3

Fig. 6. The MP architecture dynamic

4.2.3 The MP interaction model

4.2.1 Agents in the MP architecture

There are two types of agents: mobile agents that
comprise buyer agents and seller agents, and
static agents that comprise manager agents and
facilitator agents. Manager agents manage different sites in the system: ASP, MP. For MP, the
manager agent acts as the MPSM. Facilitator
agents are used to ease the migration of mobile
agents [18]. There is one facilitator agent at:
ASP, MP and e-shops. The figure 7 shows the
hierarchy of agents classes in MP.
Agents

Mobile Agents

Manager Agents

ASP_GA

The negotiation between a buyer agent and seller

agents takes place in e-shops that comprises one
or more seller agents. The FIPA Contract-Net
[19] interaction protocol is used to implement
negotiation between agents by using CFP (call
for proposal). The initiator of CFP is the buyer
agent, and the seller agents are the participants.
The CFP allows getting a list of interested seller
agents. Then, the buyer agent has to choose the
appropriate seller(s). To this end, it starts a new
negotiation through a reverse auction mechanism. The e-shop becomes then an auction room.
The algorithm 1 describes how a buyer agent interacts with the seller agents of an e-shop:

*
Static Agents

The MP facilitators help buyer and seller agents

to migrate on the e-shops within the same MP by
using the MPDS service. This second kind of
migration is called internal (or local) migration
and is similar to the migration process provided
in FIPA platforms as Jade [10]. The protocol of
the local migration is similar to global migration.
Finally, the e-shop facilitators help buyer agents
to locate seller agents within the e-shop.

Facilitator Agents

MP_GA

ASP_FA

*
1

Buyer MA

1.
*

1
Seller MA

2.
3.

MP_FA

E-shop_FA

Fig.7 . Agents classes hierarchy in MP

4.
5.

4.2.2 The MP migration model

6.

The ASP facilitators help the buyer and seller

agents to migrate to the MP sites by providing
them an itinerary obtained by querying the
MPNS servers. The address of the facilitators is
included in the itinerary provided by the MPNS
server to the mobile agent. This kind of migration is called external (or global) migration. The
protocol of the global migration is shown by figure 8.

7.

/* CFP process */
The buyer agent issues a call for proposal by sending a CFP
message to all seller agents;
The seller agents interested by the CFP answer the buyer
agent by sending a service offer;
The buyer agent selects one (or several) of the sellers having
sent an answer;
The buyer agent sends its request to the selected seller
agents;
The selected seller agents answer the buyer agent with a
proposition;
/* reverse auction process */
The buyer agent defines the wished (and hidden) price wp
/*price between a maximum and a minimum prices*/
For each round in (1..MaxRnd) do
/* MaxRnd is the maximum number of rounds allowed */
a. While number of iterations MinIt do
/* MinIt is the minimum number of iterations */
Selected seller agents send public propositions to the buyer agent;
End while;
b. if wp is lesser than all the propositions then
Seller agents are invited to decrease their
propositions;
Else

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)

8.

The buyer agent selects the first lesser

proposition
Exit;
/* End of auction */
End if;
Next round;
End of auction /* The auction ends if the maximum round
number is reached without results with seller agents */

Algorithm 1: The MP interaction model

The figure 9 shows the different interactions

within the MP multi-agents system.
Procedure MG (S, APG)
AG() //MPNS Access
Request Catalog (S,SC)
Request MPNS (SC, MP list )
Request MPNS (MP list , APG)
Procedure ML (S, APL)
AL() //MPDS Access
Request MPDS (S, eshops list)
Request MPDS (eshops list , APL)

Procedure NEG (p=QoS)

For each visited MP
For each eshop
1. Send CFP to seller agents
2. Run reverse auction for selected agents
by the CFP
3. Choose the best agents
Next Eshop
Next MP

Procedure SL (S, SA list)

//Get list of sellers (seller agents)
AL() //MPDS Access
Request MPDS (S, SA list)
Procedure synchro ()
//Infos Synchronization
//A class gathers similar services so
similar properties

ASP
MG
AG

Market Place

AL

MP_GA

Eshop
MP_GA

AL

SL
ML

MP_FA

ASP
MG
AG

ML

eshop_FA

Buyer agent

Seller agent

NEG

Local Migration (APL)

Buyer agent

Seller agent

Migration
Seller agent

ASP_FA

According to the search category SC of the request, the metasearch agent asks the MPNS
server for an itinerary that comprises a list of
places belonging to SC. After migration, the
metasearch agent meets the index agents in the
e-shops corresponding to the search theme S and
located in a place that belongs to the search category SC; the metasearch agent can then ask
several index agents, merge and filter the different results and return the best result to the user.

Global Migration
Buyer agent

ASP_FA

theme S. To facilitate the users' searches, we

propose a distributed index through index
agents.

Local Migration
Seller agent

ASP_GA

Fig. 9. The MP multi-agents system

5
APPLICATION
TO
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

THE

Each MP becomes a search place and corresponds to a search category. The e-shops become negotiation rooms and host a search
theme.
A buyer mobile agent is a search agent or
metasearch and acts on behalf of a user. A seller
agent owns an index and a search code, and can
be considered as an index agent which acts on
behalf of a provider. It is reasonable that an index agent carries only an index of a search

Search

Buyer agent
Light metasearch

Index

Seller agent
Engine agent

Fig. 10. Light metasearch and search engine agents

If the representation model of the seller agents

is the same, the SEARCH code must be implemented on the metasearch agent that becomes a
heavy metasearch agent; in this case, the seller
agents become a just index agent (figure 11).
Request

5.1 Adaptation of the MP architecture to the

IR

Interation
Request

Request

Search

The MP architecture is aimed to support any

distributed application. We will now show how
it operates for IR in the WWW. As other IR systems our approach should also use distributed
indexes, users agents, providers agents and facilitators agents. However, it relies upon the
generalization of the MP architecture market
mechanisms to IR systems. To do this, we define
the application domain "IR" as including the
class of service "Search Category", and the service as "Search theme". For example: D=IR,
SC=general, S=general, for general purpose
search and D=IR, CS=IT, S=software, for specific search.

A metasearch agent holds a code (called

SEARCH code) used to express the request according to a representation model. The SEARCH
code is matched with the index. If the seller
agents do not use the same representation model,
the SEARCH code must be included in the seller
agent that becomes a search engine agent; in this
case, the metasearch agent just carries the request as a set of keywords and becomes a light
metasearch agent (figure 10).

Interation
Matching

Buyer agent
Heavy metasearch

Index

Seller agent
Index agent

Fig. 11. Heavy metasearch and index agents

5.2 The IR Negotiation protocol

In negotiation rooms, the negotiation process
must decide how much the client's request may
be satisfied by the index agents. Several index
agents can offer the same theme S but with different qualities of service (QoS). The QoS in IR
applications is mostly measured by performance.
The performance can be evaluated according to

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
the relevance and the size of the returned results.
We assume that each index agent is able to return, in addition to results, the average relevance
and the size of these results. The negotiation
process, based upon the relevance R and the size
of the results S, can be summarized in the algorithm 2:
For each MP in the metasearch agents itinerary
For each e-shop in the MP visited by the metasearch agent
/* CFP process */
1. The metasearch agent makes a call for proposal by sending
a CFP message (SC, S) to all index agents present in the eshop;
2. Each index agent interested by the CFP is added to the selected index agents
3. The selected index agents answer the metasearch agent by
sending a service offer; /* Ns is the number of selected
agents */
/* Reverse auction process */
4. The initiator of the auction, the metasearch agent, defines
the wished (and hidden) price that reflects the Rmin relevance and the Szmax size of the results corresponding to the
search request.
5. The metasearch agent sends its request (SC, S, (k1, k2,...,
kn)) to the selected index agents (matching) ; /* ki are the
keywords */
6. For each round in (1.. Rdmax) /* Rdmax is the maximum
number of rounds allowed */
a. While number of iterations j < Jmin, (1<JminNs)
/* Jmin is the minimum number of iterations */
Each selected index j (0jJmin-1) sends public
proposition (SC,S,Rj,Szj) to the metasearch agent;
End while;
b. if (Rj<R or Sj>Sz j) then
Index agents are invited to decrease their propositions for another round (decrease Sz and/or increase R);
Else
the metasearch agent selects the three most suitable propositions (the answers that feature the maximum relevance R, the minimum size Sz and the
auction ends.
Exit; /* End of auction */
End if;
Next round;
7. The
metasearch
stores
the
results
(SC,S,(url1,url2,...,urlm),Sz,R) in its memory; /* urli are the
URL of the relevant documents */
Move to next e-shop;
Move to next place;

ASP

ASP

Metasearch
agent

Migration

Index
agent

Request = key words

Theme S
Category SC

Index
Theme S
Category SC

Search Place : Search Category SC

Migration

Negotiation Room
Theme S

SN
Index
agent

Metasearch
Agent

SN

NEG

Index
Agent

Index
Agent

Index
agent

QoS = Max (relevance) + Min(Size)

QoS=OPT(Recall, Precision)

Fig. 12. Overview of MP-IR architecture

6 A JADE IMPLEMENTATION OF
MP-IR
6.1 Implementation of the MP architecture
using jade and Java
Jade [10][20][21] is a free and open source
platform for the development of FIPA agentsbased systems.
The MP-IR architecture can be implemented
as a set of Jade platforms distributed over several computers in a network. A market place is a
set of computers including a jade main platform
server and one or several jade platforms without
main container (known as containers) servers
that implement e-shops. The ASP is a main Jade
platform and the other MP components (MPNS
and TSA) may be java services. As a result, such
an implementation of the MP architecture is
called MP-Jade framework. This framework uses Jade for agents management and java as programming language (figure 13).
MP

MPNS

MPSS

Algorithm 2. The interaction protocol between metasearch and

index agents within IR e-shops.

MPDS=HSQL
Main
container

MPNS=HSQL
MPSM=AMS

FA=DF

ASP

5.3 The MP-IR framework

According the considerations above, we are
able to outline a MP-based architecture for Web
Information Retrieval systems. We refer this architecture to as MP-IR. Figure 12 shows an
overview of MP-IR, where NEG represents the
IR interactions protocol defined by the algorithm
2.

Container 1

Seller
agent

Container 2

FA=Sub-DF

Seller
agent

Seller
agent

Container 3

Sub-DF

Buyer agent

Eshop

Seller
agent

FA=DF

TSA

Buyer agent

Eshop

Main
container

Sub-DF

GA=AMS
IPMS

Eshop

Fig. 13. The MP-Jade framework

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The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
The MP-IR architecture can then be implemented by the MP-Jade framework.
6.2 Agents in MP-IR
Every agent inherits the Agent class of the
package jade.core.agent. The tasks of each Jade
agent are called behaviours. Jade allocates one
thread for each agent. Each jade platform is controlled by the AMS (Agent Management System) agent. Information about agents which are
available on the platform is provided by the DF
(Directory Facilitator) agent.
6.2.1 Static agents
The static agents implement a cyclicBehaviour
(a repetitive behaviour issued from the class CyclicBehaviour
of
the
package
jade.core.behaviours) since they run repetitive
tasks.
The DF agent of the main platform (for example
a market place) can act as MP facilitator agent.
The AMS agent of the main platform manages
the places and can act as the MPSM agent.
6.2.2 Mobile agents
-

The metasearch agents may have an advanced decision autonomy model. We

think that the Jade finite state machine
(FSM) model is suitable for this type of
agent. FSM are instances of the class
FSMBehaviour
of
the
package
jade.core.behaviours.FSMBehaviour and
can implement behaviours. The request of
the client is included in the behaviour of
the agent.

In this section, we will show the experimental

tests we did in order to validate our proposition.
The tests address the relevance of the results it
provides to requests. For this purpose, we have
developed two IR systems. The first one is a
classical IR system based upon Terrier [22]. Terrier is a highly flexible and efficient open source
search engine, used in large collections of documents. Terrier is a complete and transparent java platform for research and experimentation in
the text retrieval. The second IR system is MPbased IR system using market interactions according to the algorithm 2 (see figure 14). We
have also used two benchmarks: the first one is a
huge benchmark taken from a collection of XML
documents called INEX 2005 [23] that contains
17 000 items, a set of requests and a list of relevant documents for each request. The second
one is a personalized benchmark called corpus
that contains a set of documents, a set of requests and a list of relevant documents for each
request. The corpus we used contains 500 documents and 40 requests.
The relevance is measured by two factors: the
precision and the recall [24]. The recall
measures the ability of the system to retrieve all
relevant documents. The precision measures the
ability of the system to retrieve only relevant
documents and reject all irrelevant documents.
Market Place
Jade platform

Client

Main-container

Information Provider

Jade platform

Envoi

Main-container

Envoi

Negotiation Room
Migration
or Remote
interaction
Search agent

Search agent

Ask

Publish

Thematic
Provider AgentIndex.xml

Information Provider

Publish
Broker Agent

Thematic
Provider Agent
Index.xml

Envoi

Publish

The index agents may also implement a finite state machine but lighter than those of
the metasearch agents because it do not
performs
multiple
migrations
as
metasearch agents do. The service
(code+index) of the provider is included in
the behaviour. At its arrival in a place, an
index agent registers its services to the
sub-DF agent of the appropriate e-shop.
Finally, an index agent can interact remotely with its provider site by sockets.

7 EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION

Thematic
Provider Agent
Index.xml

Browser
Negotiation Room

Information Provider
Search Engine
Full Index Base

Negotiation Room

Fig. 14. Overview of MP-IR Jade prototype

7.1 Basic Tests

We perform our tests on the Inex benchmark.
In order to evaluate the quality of our system, we
have chosen assessment files in the Inex collection containing requests and corresponding relevant documents. To do our tests, we have chosen
six requests (Q1..Q6) as shown in the table 1.

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
Table 1. Chosen Inex requests
Q

Requests

Problems physical limits miniaturization

microprocessor
Mining frequent pattern itemset sequence
graph association
Gibbs sampler
User-centered design of web sites
Computer assisted composing music
notes MIDI
Capabilities limitations commercial
speech recognition software

2
3
4
5
6

Assessment
files
206. xml
209. xml
213. xml
217. xml
218. xml
221. xml

Using category and theme search

We calculate the recall and precision measures
corresponding to the requests Q1Q6 for
searches with and without consideration of category and theme (see table 2 and figure 15). We
have fixed the following parameters:
Rdmax (see algorithm 1) = 1
Number of providers = 3

Varying number of negotiation rounds

We study the impact of the number of negotiation rounds on the relevance. We have calculated
the recall/precision measures for the requests
Q1Q6 by varying the number of rounds from
1 to 3 (see table 3 and figure 16). We have fixed
the following parameters:
Number of providers=3
Advanced search (choosing category
and theme)
Table 3. Recall-precision in function of the number of rounds

Request
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Q5
Q6
Average

1 round
Recall
0,85
0,75
0,2
0,72
0,67
0,84
0,67

Precision
0,66
0,42
0,88
0,53
0,5
0,47
0,58

2 rounds
Recall Precision
0,92
0,66
0,9
0,42
0,4
0,75
0,72
0,57
0,8
0,47
0,8
0,5
0,76
0,56

3 rounds
Recall Precision
0,92
0,78
0,9
0,47
0,2
0,92
0,72
0,57
0,7
0,41
0,84
0,5
0,71
0,61

Table 2. Recall-precision with and without category and theme

Request
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Q5
Q6
Average

Basic search
Recall Precision
0,38
0,13
0,45
0,27
0,28
0,7
0,2
0,18
0,4
0,11
0,5
0,24
0,37
0,27

Advanced search
Recall Precision
0,85
0,66
0,75
0,42
0,2
0,88
0,72
0,53
0,67
0,5
0,84
0,57
0,67
0,59
Fig. 16. Recall-precision in function of the number of rounds

We can notice that there is an optimal Rdmax in

which the recall-precision is the best. In our
case, when Rdmax=2, the recall-precision is optimal.

Fig. 15. Recall-precision measures with and without category

and theme

We can notice that the recall/precision values of

the advanced search are better than those of a
simple search. This is due to the fact that the
number of relevant documents in a given category and theme is higher than the number of the
relevant documents in a general collection.

Varying number of providers

We study the impact of the number of providers
on the relevance. We have then calculated the
recall-precision measures for the requests
Q1Q6 by varying the number of providers
from 3 to 7 (see table 4 and figure 17). We have
fixed the following parameters:
Rdmax = 1
Advanced search

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
Table 4. Recall-precision in function of the number of providers

Request
Q1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Q5
Q6
Average

3 providers
Recall Precision
0,85
0,66
0,75
0,42
0,2
0,88
0,72
0,53
0,67
0,5
0,84
0,47
0,67
0,58

5 providers
Recall Precision
0,9
0,61
0,84
0,43
0,27
0,9
0,76
0,48
0,9
0,41
0 ,8
0,51
0,61
0,56

7 providers
Recall Precision
0 ,8
0,55
0,86
0,4
0,27
0,9
0,85
0,56
0,9
0,55
0,85
0,53
0,62
0,58
Fig. 18. Recall-precision curves of both systems

7.2.2 Using the personalized benchmark

We also did our tests on the personalized
benchmark. Both systems use the same corpus.
The table 6 summarizes the average precision
depending of the recall for the 40 requests.
Table 6. Average precision depending on the 11 recall levels

Fig. 17. Recall-precision in function of the number of providers

We can notice that when the number of providers grows, the recall-precision reaches first an
optimum and then decreases. In our case, the optimum is with 3 providers.
7.2 Comparison with classical IR system
7.2.1 Using the Inex benchmark
Using Inex benchmark, we now compare the
precision and the recall of both systems. We
have fixed the following parameters:
Advanced search
Rdmax=1
Number of providers = 3

Terrier
MP-IR

50
16.03
15.00

0
69.96
60.51

Standard recall levels (%)

10
20
30
55.45
48.67
31.48
50.44
43.92
29.17

Standard recall levels (%)

60
70
80
90
12.65
10.88
9.12 5.55
11.64
10.88
9.12 5.55

40
22.07
20.05

100
1.75
1.75

The figure 19 shows the average precision

curve using the 11 standard recall levels for the
40 requests. Globally, it is interesting to note
that, although Terrier is a bit better, both curves
are similar.

The measures we did are based upon the recall

and precision curves. Table 5 summarizes the results and figure 18, shows the recall-precision
curves. Globally, it is interesting to note that,
although Terrier is better, both curves are almost
similar.
Fig. 19. Average precision of the Terrier and MP-IR

Table 5. Precision/recall values of both systems

MP-IR
Request Recall
Q1
0,85
Q2
0,75
Q3
0,2
Q4
0,72
Q5
0,67
Q6
0,84

Terrier
Precision Recall
0,66
0,9
0,42
0,33
0,88
0,15
0,53
0,5
0,5
0,85
0,47
0,92

Precision
0,4
0,4
0,95
0,6
0,21
0,41

8 CONCLUSION
WORKS

AND

FUTURE

There is an increasing need for World Wide

Web Information Research systems to offer a
very high level of relevance. However, while

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International Journal of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (IJDIWC) 3(3): 277-289
The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications, 2013 (ISSN: 2225-658X)
the volume of information increases, the index
bases grow and the relevance of the documents
returned to users requests tends to dramatically
decrease. Many approaches have been proposed
to improve the relevance but still do not satisfactorily succeed.
Using MA to distribute indexes and to convey
users requests is a good idea. However, MA address the issues of security and interoperability.
To answer those issues, we have proposed a
novel MA interaction model, the SB model, in
which buyer agents meet seller agents only in
market places, and developed a global architectural design called MP architecture based upon
the SB model. To achieve our proposition, all interactions between agents are based upon market
mechanisms such as negotiation and competition. Finally, we apply MP architecture to IR
systems. The IR framework based upon MP architecture is called MP-IR.

In further work, we intend to complete the

MP-IR prototype by improving the algorithm 2
and to perform deeper experiments against classical IR systems by using the whole Inex collection.

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matching between the users' queries and the indexed sources of information, through market
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agents meet in market places and interact by
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