Artificial Intelligence in E-Tourism.

Artificial Intelligence is the name given to Scientific Research. from past 40 years onwords lot of Innovatons came from Artificail Intelligence Applications. Exponential development of World wide Web has changed traditional concepts in many human concepts like Business, Commerce, Governance or Turisim. These changes are due to different reasons., i.e the number of users connected to the Internet are increasing from the evaluation of the Internet. Vast amount of information available on Internet and easy to access any weare in the World. Internet spans the Globe. characterstics like e-mail, and secure information transmission have opened news Research and Application fields. Currently it is possible to do commercial transactions using the web. Nowadays most the companies are using the Internet for gaining competetive market advantage.

In the tourism field, it possible to find travel agencies, transportation, hotel, or car companies that offer different products in the web. the tourism field has been modified by the electronic transactions that are being made possible through Internet.

e-tourism is an user adopted plan to trip will first initiate a search through web, idetifying the locations, map the distances, communication facilities exists etc. are searched through web. we already have an application to tmplement this ystem through Multi Agent System. These systems llows new users to enter into systems any time, also interact with travel agents to map their Trips.

However there are serious problems to retrieve, manage, and reuse the information stored in the web. Some of the imprtant problems are

* Number of "sites" which offers potential useful information.

* The information served by companies could change along the time.

* Access to the information sources is not always possible.

* Hetrogenious representation for the information.

* The bargains offered by the companies can be modified over time.

Actually, to solve these problems there are many systems that extract, filter, and represent efficiently the information obtained from the Web. However, most of these systems are focussed mainly on the amount of the information obtained from the web. However, most of these systems are focussed mainly on the amount of the information to be retrieved on the information representation. Unfortunately these systems are not able to solve all the problems.

To develop potential capabilities of the web, it is necessary to find new apporoaches to allow design and build systems automatically.

* Search and retrieve the useful information.

* Manage and reason with different solutions.

* Adopt to the Profile User, to customize the answers.

* Gain efficiency for the interaction among these agents.

Electronic - Tourism Domain .

"Those different electronic resources available for a travel agent (human or software) tha could be used to plan a travol."

An electronic - travel agent must have the ability to manage all the necessary information to schedule the travel user requirementss. In this kind of komain, the planning agent neeeds to represent several towns, transports, lodging palces, etc. And the agent needs to know how the user could travel between towns, airports, train stations, rent a car, or book a room in a hotel. Following Figure shows the graphical representation of an example in this domain, where a user might take different transports and hotels to reach his/her desired goal.

The most important points in the m anagement of a travel are:

a) Moving from the origin to the destination town.

b) Lodging at destination.

c) Transport possibility at targent town.

d) Returning to initial (or other ) town.

To handle item I, so far we have considered the airplanse, train , or bus as trravel transport. Also, the user may need to take a local train, bus, or taxi to move to the airport, train station, or bus station. This means that the agent needs also to decide which local transport to use. This is an imprtant and complex part of the problem because the number of possible solutions grows exponentially. The moving possibility around the target town refers to the possibility of reating a

car or to provide to the user information about public transport (bus, subway).Another important issue is that there are many different solutions to a given problem and all of them should be ordered according to several parameters. For example, the solutions could be ordered according to cost, amonnt of time to complete the travel, or user preferences ( for example, if a customer decides not to travel by plane)

* The agent should also be able to reason with out all the information, because many times not all the information is accessible. That situation should not stop the problem solving task and should try to look for alternative solutions.

* In the e-tourism domain, the main electronic information sources will be accessible through web. i.e easily managed by the travel agent.

* Some popular approaches used in the web have been the Web Agents, especially the softbots and spiders. Systems named search engines have been very successful in the last few years, be

cause they allow a user to easily obtain the useful information from the web.

It is very useful to the travel agents to mange very easily.

* Now a days it is possible to find systems that allow defining and proving agents with different skills, language communications like multimedia etc. The objective of Zeus project was to facilitate the rapid development of new multi agent applications by abstracting into a tool kit, the common principles and components underlaying some existing multi agent systems.

Travel Plan:

There are different approaches to work with the information stored in the web. This situation analysis some of them that uses the Artificial Intelligence techniques. The key Abstraction used in these systems is the agent concept. i.e Multi-agent systems(MAS) are are sub field of distributed Artificial Intelligence.

Multi-agent Systems are successsful due to diferent reasons.

*They are able to solve big-size problems.

*They allow different systems to work interconnected and cooperate.

*They provide efficient solutions where information is distributed among different places.

*They allow software reusability, there fore there is more flexibility to adopt different agent capabilities to solve a problem.

TravelPlan Architecture. Travel Plan follows MultiUserAgent Architecture that interacts with different types of agents.

* UserAgent: UserAgent pays attention to the users queries and shows the solution. It analysis the problem and obtains an abstract representation. Subsequently it requests to a planner agent for a solution to that problem. The usergent has different skills like communication with planneragents and users, or learning the users profiles necessary to customize the systems and answer the queries.

* PlannerAgents: The main goal of PlannerAgent is reasoning about UserAgents and other Planneragents problems, and find the set of possible solutions. These agents have different communication skills, planning and learning t

echniques to index and to categorize each plan.

* WebBot: This agent fills in the details that are requested by PlannerAgents and obtaining the required information from internet. Different partial solutions given by the Webagents are combined by the Planneragents.

TravelPlan has a cooperative architecture where different agents need to cooperate to reach solutions obtained by the PlannerAgents. travelPlan success needs both characterstics sharing knowledge to obtain new solutions.

Shared Information amoung Agents:

Agents in TravelPlan represents some common knowledge representation schemes. These characterstics allow simplifying the processes of sharing and reasoning with the knowledge. The communication among the agents uses Performatives. the first performative request is sent by the PlannerAgent to a webBot asking for a travel trip in between Source city and Destination city. the second performative inform is the request from the webBot to the PlannerAgent. The performatives accepts and rejects are used to make the cooperation and negotiation among the agents are possibleUsing the communication protocol, the PlannerAgent completes the semi-complete solutions obtained from the User definition problem and from the abstract solutions given by the planner.

Communication Protocol:

TravelPlan agents needs to implement a communication language that tells how Data and Information transmitted from UserAgents to Planneragents to WebBot and vice versa, by using Request, Accept, Inform, Reject, Request-to-do.

In communication process each agent acknowledges the messages and generate the performative accept. when processed they send answer message to the agent. the Planneragent sends a proposal for cooperation, to the WebBot, and this agentjejects the request. When the PlannerAgent really needs the information sends a new request and finally obtained the desired information.

TravelPlan like other MAS uses a set of grahical user interface (GUI) to communicate with the users.

Conclusion: The UserAgent has different user interfaces to communicate with the user. The first interface is to Input the Problem from the User and second one is optional and it it used to define the user preferences. when the System solves the problem, the PlannerAgent returns sample solutions to the user. When the system solves the problem example, the PlannerAgent returns sample solutions to the user. The system rejects a set of Possible solutions in order go gain in efficiency and only a subset of solutions is shown to the user. Travelplan recommends a particular solution. If this solution matches with the learned preference from the user. To do this, the UserAgent that pays attention to the users, extracts the useful characterstics from the old stored solutions by the users, and uses them to classify all the possible solutions.