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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Control and cooperation in distributed expert systems

Book ·
OSTI ID:5169840
The authors present an investigation of knowledge engineering techniques that support problem-solving activity on a network of workstations. The research takes into consideration goals and constraints derived from an application domain, an organization of the intended users, and the specific problem to be solved. The results of the research would enable the implementation of a network of autonomous expert systems capable of solving problems in a variety of domains. The major difficulty in reaching these objectives is to control the multiple expert systems so that they cooperate in solving a problem and arrive at a global consensus. This difficulty has been solved by the use of a question-and-answer paradigm, in which the interactions occur by means of a blackboard data structure. The blackboard, implemented at each workstation, also contains meta-knowledge about the questions and answers in the form of values for question difficulty, question importance, and answer confidence. This use of meta-knowledge is a novel stratagem which has not been previously investigated. 4 references.
OSTI ID:
5169840
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English