Information fusion in a cooperative multi-agent system for web information retrieval

As an attempt to solve some contemporary web information retrieval problems, a construction of a cooperative multiagent system is proposed. This. paper introduces the system and presents the use of a, unique aggregation and fusion technique that is employed to attain reliable delivery performance. The intelligent methodology to fuse agents´ decisions, the team consensus approach, models the interaction and bring a society into a consensus. After each agent in the group gathers information relevant to a user´s query, the group engages in an uncertainty estimation stage. This process allows each agent to assess its self-uncertainty and the conditional uncertainties of other agents. The procedure facilitates the computation of a weighting scheme that operates recursively on information collected by these agents until the group reaches a consensus. Whenever a new task is received, the uncertainty estimates of agent are updated and used to compute a new weighting scheme.