Flexible integration of planning and information gathering

Abstract

The evolution of the electronic sources connected through wide area networks like Internet has encouraged the development of new information gathering techniques that go beyond traditional information retrieval and Web search methods. They use advanced techniques, like planning or constraint programming, to integrate and reason about hetereogeneous information sources. In this paper we describe MAPWeb, a multiagent framework that integrates planning agents and Web information retrieval agents. The goal of this framework is to deal with problems that require planning with information to be gathered from the Web. MAPWeb decouples planning from information gathering, by splitting a planning problem into two parts: solving an abstract problem and validating and completing the abstract solutions by means of information gathering. This decoupling allows also to address an important aspect of information gathering: the Web is a dynamic medium and more and more companies make their information available in the Web everyday. The MAPWeb framework can be adapted quickly to these changes by just modifying an abstract planning domain and adding the required information gathering agents. For instance, in a travel assistant domain, if taxi companies begin to oer Web information, it would only be necessary to add new planning operators related to traveling by taxi, for a more complete travel domain. This paper describes the MAPWeb planning process, focusing on the aforementioned exibility aspect.