An On-Line Multi-CBR Agent Dispatching Algorithm

Abstract

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is an effective and fast problem-solving methodology, which solves new problems by remembering and adaptation of past cases. With the increasing requests for useful references for all kinds of problems and from different locations, keeping a single CBR system seems to be outdated and not practical. Multi-CBR agents located in different places are of great support to fast meet these requests. In this paper, the architecture of a multi-CBR agent system is proposed, where each CBR agent locates at different places, and is assumed to have the same ability to deal with new problem independently. When requests in a request queue are coming one by one from different places, we propose a new policy of agent dispatching to satisfy the request queue. Throughout the paper, we assume that the system must solve the coming request by considering only past requests. In this context, the performance of traditional greedy algorithms is not satisfactory. We apply a new but simple approach – competitive algorithm for on-line problem (called ODAL) to determine the dispatching policy to keep comparative low cost. The corresponding on-line dispatching algorithm is proposed and the competitive ratio is given. Based on the competitive algorithm, the dispatching of multi-CBR agents is optimized.