An application of a multiple agent system for flexible assembly tasks

Describes a communication framework which enables knowledge-based computing resources to act cooperatively over a high bandwidth data path. The system has been designed to allow unrestricted access to an agent's local knowledge base by a well-defined interface. It also minimises unnecessary traffic through the establishment of an automatically maintained knowledge base in a central serving node of a star-connected architecture. This knowledge base allows a client expert to treat the remainder of the system as an homogeneous knowledge-whole, avoiding the necessity of local, a priori, meta-knowledge, whilst retaining efficiency of knowledge search. A client expert maintains a local knowledge base or, more properly, belief base, which is structured in schemata form. The notion of procedural attachment to schema slots is implemented, as is the concept of assumptive dependency. The fact that more than one expert exists in a system introduces the problem of conflict resolution, where two or more experts may present conflicting truth-functional assertions. A simple pattern-matching query language is extended via two operators, allowing simple combination of belief. The system operates using the TCP-IP protocols over a proprietary CSMA/CD broadband local-area network. The high-level interface is implemented in CommonLisp.<
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