MAPWEB: cooperation between planning agents and Web agents

Abstract

This article presents MAPWEB (Multi-Agent Planning on the Web), a multi-agent system for cooperative work between different intelligent software agents whose main goal is to solve user planning problems arising from information stored on the world wide web. The author describes how MAPWEB is made of a heterogeneous mixture of intelligent agents whose main characteristics are cooperation, reasoning and knowledge sharing. The article explains how the architecture of MAPWEB uses four types of agents: user agents that are the bridge between the users and the system; control agents (manager and coach agents) that are responsible for managing the rest of the agents; planner agents that are able to solve planning problems; and finally web agents whose aim is to retrieve, represent and share information obtained from the web.