On Utilizing Stochastic Non-linear Fractional Bin Packing to Resolve Distributed Web Crawling

This paper deals with the extremely pertinent problem of web crawling, which is far from trivial considering the magnitude and all-pervasive nature of the World-Wide Web. While numerous AI tools can be used to deal with this task, in this paper we map the problem onto the combinatorially-hard stochastic non-linear fractional knapsack problem, which, in turn, is then solved using Learning Automata (LA). Such LA-based solutions have been recently shown to outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches to resource allocation in Web monitoring. However, the ever growing deployment of distributed systems raises the need for solutions that cope with a distributed setting. In this paper, we prese…