Iranian Journal of Information Science and Technology

Vol 4, No 2, ISSN 1726-8125, 2006

MULTI-PHASE ADAPTATION FOR BROKER AGENTS

M. M. EL-KHOULY, Ph.D. , Helwan University, Faculty of Science , 40 Tregenna Avenue, South Harrow, HA2 8QT, U.K

Abstract

Many important and useful applications for software agents require multiple agents on a network that communicate with each other. We often use the word “agent” to describe people who have a helping or assistive relationship to us –– travel agents, secretaries, butlers. The job of such an agent is to act autonomously to satisfy goals that we may have, give us a greater sense of productivity and reduce our workload. In this article we’ll use the word agent to describe software that plays a similar role – providing help, advice, and work as a broker who has several software components and can assign one for the user. Such agents can retrieve software components for reuse from their repositories. However, if the keywords of the retrieving disaccords, the retrieval can be failure even if the eligible components exist in the component repository. We propose an information retrieval technique to help in retrieving the software components from the repositories. This technique uses three levels for retrieving components from a repository and can adapt the retrieved components to suite with the required query. The advantage of this technique is that the exact match is not necessary to find a similar software component.

Keywords - Information Retrieval, Reuse, Software Agent, Adaptation, Case-Based-Reasoning.

email: melkhouly@yahoo.com