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Intelligent Agents in Federative Expert Systems — Concepts and Implementation

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Abstract

Today’s expert systems lack possibilities to solve large, complex and heterogeneous tasks. One approach to handle these problems deals with the development of cooperating systems. Due to the major characteristics of the agents in such an environment (autonomous, decentralized, independent) we call the global system “federative expert system”. Federative cooperation of intelligent systems leads to a broad range of interesting questions. Some of these are local and global architectures, assessing system’s competence to solve problems, task allocation, task decomposition and synthesis of (sub-) results.

In this paper we describe a concept of federative cooperation between intelligent agents and discuss the features needed to make expert systems really competent for cooperative problem solving. One of the central questions adressed in this paper deals with the problem of how to describe and assess the competence of intelligent systems. Finally we present an implementation of a federative expert system, which solves complex and heterogenous tasks in banking.

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© 1991 Springer-Verlag London Limited

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Kirn, S., Schlageter, G. (1991). Intelligent Agents in Federative Expert Systems — Concepts and Implementation. In: Deen, S.M. (eds) CKBS ’90. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1831-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1831-2_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-19649-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-1831-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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