Collaborative Multiagent Adaptation for Business Environmental Scanning Through the Internet

摘要

Businesses should promptly respond to their dynamic environments. Environmental scanners are thus essential for the businesses to discover and monitor environmental information of interest (IOI). In this paper, we explore user-centered, continuous and resource-bounded environmental scanning (UCRES). Upon receiving information preferences of managers, new IOI should be continuously detected in a timely and complete manner without consuming too much resource (e.g. bandwidths of computer networks and services of information servers). We develop a multiagent framework AESA to tackle the challenges of UCRES. Each agent is a simple entity. All agents collaboratively adapt their population and resource consumption to several dynamic aspects of UCRES: information preferences of individual users, resource limitation of environmental scanning, distribution of IOI in the environments, and update behaviors of the IOI. The delivery of AESA to businesses may constantly provide a larger amount of important and timely IOI without exhausting the Intranet and the Internet communities.