Scott,
Someone else is likely to have a more relevant answer but I thought I'd
give my 2 cents worth - it's been a while (15 years?!) so I hope I can
remember this correctly...
During my graduate studies I worked with Dr. Len Myers and others at
CalPoly SLO on a BB based system that used CLIPS (Jess' predecessor.) In
that system, there was a distributed set of agents that worked in
cooperation to advise a CAD system user about their current drawing.
This system worked by having each agent have it's own rulebase and
working memory. The BB was implemented by special (bbassert) and
(bbretract) functions that sent the facts to a central server from which
any registered agent listeners would get a subsequent broadcast message
with the fact(s).
The listening agents could then do whatever they wanted with the
knowledge, usually by calling (bbassert) themselves. It was a pretty
simple distributed blackboard system. You could probably build the
plumbing for one of these types of systems yourself quite easily.
As I remember it, the tricky part was coordinating/arbitrating the
agents and keeping them from, in circular fashion, asserting and
retracting each other's facts. This task was left to a conflict resolver
agent.
I'm sure there is a lot of theory you could read up on about this topic
so I won't go into it here. In our system, each agent posted their
suggestion (e.g. a value for a drawing attribute, etc) to the blackboard
and the conflict resolver made it's decision and determined the final
result/value. Each agent would then have to deal with the new reality.
It was fun to work on and I'm sure some CalPoly SLO staff, faculty, or
students are on this list and could share with you what happened to that
system or it's derivatives.
Good luck!
alan
Krasnigor, Scott L (N-AST) wrote:
I have been asked by the powers to be to investigate using Jess in
conjunction with a blackboard framework. I was wondering if anyone out
there has any experience with this combination and could provide some
insight or could point me to some good resources/examples on the
subject. Thanks.
Scott L. Krasnigor
Principal Engineer/Scientist
Atlantic Science & Technology
Lockheed Martin - MS2
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