Agents for Information Broadcasting

In this paper we consider an environment which consists of one broadcasting entity (producer) which broadcasts information to a large number of personal computer users, who can down-load information to their PC disks (consumers). We concentrate on the most critical phase of the broadcasting system operation, which is the characterization of the users’ needs in order to maximize the efficiency of the broadcast information. Since the broadcasting system can not consider each user in isolation, it has to consider certain communities of users. We have proposed using a hierarchic distributed model of software agents to facilitate receiving feedback from the users by the broadcasting system. These agents cluster the system’s users into communities with similar interest domains. Subsequently, these agents calculate a representative profile for each community. Finally, the broadcasting agent builds an appropriate broadcasting program for each community. We developed a simulation of the broadcasting environment in order to evaluate and analyze the performance of our proposed model and techniques. The simulation results support our hypothesis that our techniques provide broadcasting programs, which are of great interest to the users.

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