Performance evaluation of SDIAGENT, a multi-agent system for distributed fuzzy geospatial data conflation

A rapid growth of available geospatial data requires development of systems capable of autonomous data retrieval, integration and validation. Mobile agents may provide the suitable framework for developing such systems since this technology, in a natural way, can deal with the distributed heterogeneous nature of such data. In this paper, we evaluate SDIAGENT our, recently introduced, multi-agent architecture for geospatial data integration and conflation, and compare its model performance with that of client/server and single-agent approaches. Experimental results for several realistic scenarios, under varying conditions, are presented for these three system architectures. We analyze the performance alteration for various numbers of participating nodes, varying amount of database accesses, processing loads, and network loads. 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 0020-0255/$ see front matter 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2005.07.009 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 618 453 6033; fax: +1 618 453 6044. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Rahimi), [email protected] (J. Bjursell), marcin@ cs.okstate.edu (M. Paprzycki), [email protected] (M. Cobb), [email protected] (D. Ali). 1176 S. Rahimi et al. / Information Sciences 176 (2006) 1175–1189