Abstract
EPSILON is a knowledge base management system incorporating objects, inheritance, logic (meta-)programming and databases in an uniform framework. We present an architecture for distributed problem solving in a network of EPSILON workstations, which allows different parts of one integrated application, distributed on several nodes in the network, to communicate and cooperate. Distributed problem solving, regarded as the solution of problems by cooperation of autonomous problem solving agents, is supported by a communication subsystem with control distributed among the processing nodes. The architecture allows to split one global knowledge base, allocating parts of it to the nodes where they are used most frequently, as well as to integrate existing knowledge base with different representations formalisms and their inference engines (corresponding to integration of existing expert systems from different application domains). Especially problems related to cooperation among different inference engines on different machines have been considered. Further on, we were concerned with the problem of how a knowledge base can be partitioned to facilitate parallel inference and to make most efficient use of the resources of the network (multiple processors, storage). The concepts described in the paper should be applicable to any knowledge base management system using objects and inheritance.
EPSILON is the acronym for ESPRIT I Project 530, “Advance BMS Based on the Integration of Logic Programming and Databases”
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© 1990 ECSC, EEC, EAEC, Brussels and Luxembourg
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Kniesel, G., Cremers, A.B. (1990). Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving in Epsilon. In: ESPRIT ’90. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0705-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0705-8_14
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