Using Multiagent Systems to Improve Real-Time Map Generation

Thanks to new technological advances, geospatial information is getting easier to disseminate via Internet and to access using mobile devices. Currently, several mapping applications are providing thousands of users worldwide with web and mobile maps generated automatically by extracting and displaying pre-processed data which is stored beforehand in specific databases. Though rapid, this approach lacks flexibility. To enhance this flexibility, the mapping application must determine by itself the spatial information that should be considered as relevant with respect to the map context of use. It must also determine and apply the relevant transformations to spatial information, autonomously and on-the-fly, in order to adapt it to the user's needs. In order to support this reasoning process, several knowledge-based approaches have been proposed. However, they did not often result in satisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a multiagent-based approach to improve real-time web and mobile map generation in terms of personalization, data generation and transfer. To this end, the agents of our system compete for space occupation until they are able to generate the required map. These agents, which are assigned to spatial objects, generate and transfer the final data to the user simultaneously, in real-time.