Communication Protocols for Distributed Reasoning in Expert Systems

Abstract

Abstract: Human experts frequently communicate to find a solution to a complicated problem or to confirm their thought about how to solve a problem. An expert system could be facilitated to consult with other same domain expert system in order to better handle a request, too. In this paper a distributed rule-based expert system is designed and implemented. The required protocol for the communication of the expert system with other same domain expert systems is developed. Same-domain expert systems are facilitated to be able to interact with each other in their forward chaining and/or backward chining inference process in order to handle a request more professionally. Ontology is used to represent each expert’s knowledge. The distributed system is implemented in JADE environment using FIPA standards while Protégé is used for ontology implementation. The system was successfully tested on a travel recommender application. The tests show that two expert systems could very well used each other’s knowledge to recommend a route which could not have been recommended by each of the experts.