Shell for cooperating expert systems

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 1991

Authors

oliveira, e (Author) FEUP; camacho, r (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Expert Systems

Vol. 8

Pages: 75-85

ISSN: 0266-4720

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge

Scopus - 1 Citation

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-007-5DC

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0394.1991.tb00255.x

Abstract (EN): This paper describes a shell for cooperating expert systems that has been developed at the University of Porto. The main goal of this shell is two-fold: to generate a community of cooperative knowledge-based systems and to develop several special reasoning techniques which can be used under a distributed and cooperative paradigm. UPShell is able to convert a set of generated intelligent systems (ISs) into a community of cooperative ISs. In this first version it is already possible to generate different intelligent systems which are able to run 'simultaneously' as separate Unix processes and, using a message-passing mechanism, to communicate among themselves. They can be set to pursue an overall goal in a cooperative way. Moreover, several tasks can be given to each IS to be solved simultaneously, and the IS can switch from task to task according to dynamic priorities reflecting the urgency attached to the specific sub-tasks that emerge. The shell described here may also be used to test, within a distributed environment, some time-bounded reasoning techniques that are presently being developed. The paper has three main parts: a general overview of the UPShell (Section 1); a tutorial explaining, by means of examples, how to use the package (Section 2); and, finally, some considerations on the reasoning techniques used and future improvements (Sections 3-5).

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 11