A Multiagent Recommender System with Task-Based Agent Specialization

This paper describes a multiagent recommender system where agents maintain local knowledge bases and, when requested to support a travel planning task, they collaborate exchanging information stored in their local bases. A request for a travel recommendation is decomposed by the system into sub tasks, corresponding to travel services. Agents select tasks autonomously, and accomplish them with the help of the knowledge derived from previous solutions. In the proposed architecture, agents become experts in some task types, and this makes the recommendation generation more efficient. In this paper, we validate the model via simulations where agents collaborate to recommend a travel package to the user. The experiments show that specialization is useful hence providing a validation of the proposed model.

[1]  Josep Lluís de la Rosa i Esteva,et al.  A Taxonomy of Recommender Agents on the Internet , 2003, Artificial Intelligence Review.

[2]  Yoav Shoham,et al.  Fab: content-based, collaborative recommendation , 1997, CACM.

[3]  Bamshad Mobasher,et al.  Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization , 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[4]  Gediminas Adomavicius,et al.  Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

[5]  Ana L. C. Bazzan,et al.  Task Allocation in Case-Based Recommender Systems: A Swarm Intelligence Approach , 2007 .

[6]  Michael J. Pazzani,et al.  A hybrid user model for news story classification , 1999 .

[7]  John Riedl,et al.  E-Commerce Recommendation Applications , 2004, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

[8]  Alfred Kobsa,et al.  The Adaptive Web, Methods and Strategies of Web Personalization , 2007, The Adaptive Web.

[9]  Boi Faltings,et al.  A Multi-Agent Recommender System for Planning Meetings , 2000 .

[10]  Francesco Ricci,et al.  Case-Based Recommender Systems: A Unifying View , 2003, ITWP.

[11]  K. P. Sycara Multiagent systems : Special issue on agents , 1998 .

[12]  Barry Smyth,et al.  Case-Based Recommendation , 2007, The Adaptive Web.

[13]  Francesco Ricci,et al.  Travel Recommender Systems , 2002 .

[14]  Francesco Ricci,et al.  E-commerce and tourism , 2004, CACM.

[15]  John Riedl,et al.  GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews , 1994, CSCW '94.

[16]  Fabio Bellifemine,et al.  Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE (Wiley Series in Agent Technology) , 2007 .

[17]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Recommender systems: a market-based design , 2003, AAMAS '03.

[18]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Agents that reduce work and information overload , 1994, CACM.

[19]  Liliana Ardissono,et al.  Personalization in E-Commerce Applications , 2007, The Adaptive Web.

[20]  B. Ohman,et al.  Discrete sensor validation with multilevel flow models , 2002 .

[21]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  Developing Multi-agent Systems with JADE , 2007, ATAL.