Self-organising hierarchical retrieval in a case-agent system

This paper describes the implementation of a distributed case-agent system where a case-base is comprised of a set of agents, where each computational agent is a case, rather than the standard case-base reasoning model where a single computational agent accesses a single case-base. This paper demonstrates a set of features that can be modelled in a case-agent system focusing on distributed self-organising hierarchical retrieval. The performance of the system is evaluated and compared to that of a well recognised hierarchical retrieval method (i.e., footprint-based retrieval). The emergent properties of the case-agent architecture are discussed.