Solving Travel Problems by Integrating WEB Information with Planning

The evolution of the WEB has encouraged the development of new information gathering techniques. In order to retrieve WEB information, it is necessary to integrate different sources. Planning techniques have been used for this purpose in the field of information gathering. A plan for information gathering is the sequence of actions that specify what information sources should be accessed so that some characteristicts, like access efficiency, are optimised. MAPWEB is a multiagent framework that integrates Planning Agents and WEB Information Retrieval Agents. In MAPWEB, planning is not only used to integrate and to select information sources, but also to solve actual planning problems with information gathered from the WEB. For instance, in an travel assistant domain, plans represent the sequence of actions an user has to follow to perform his/her trip. But also, each step in the plan informs the WebAgents which information sources should be accessed. In this paper we describe MAPWEB and study experimentally two information retrieval characteristics: the average number of solutions retrieved depending on the WebAgents used and the allocated time limit, and the number of problems solved (those travel assistant problems for which at least one solution was retrieved).