Agents for information retrieval: Issues of mobility and coordination

This paper focuses on agent-based applications for information retrieval on the Web, by specifically analysing mobility and coordination issues. On th e one hand, mobile agents well suit the requirements of information retriev al in the new dynamic scenario derived from the Internet. This is due to th eir capability of moving to the place where the information is stored - the refore saving bandwidth - and to their robustness in the presence of unreli able connections. On the other hand, the search for information by several mobile active agents calls for suitable models to rule the interactions amo ng agents and between agents and execution environments. The paper surveys different coordination approaches and evaluates their impact in information retrieval applications based on mobile agents. The survey outlines the adv antages of uncoupled coordination models and points out the suitability of a coordination model based on reactive and programmable tuple spaces: they may increase the safety and the security of the environment while simplifyi ng the task of programming distributed mobile agent applications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.