DJess A Knowledge-Sharing Middleware to Deploy Distributed Inference Systems

In this paper DJess is presented, a novel distributed production system that provides an infrastructure for factual and procedural knowledge sharing. DJess is a Java package that provides programmers with a lightweight middleware by which inference systems implemented in Jess and running on different nodes of a network can communicate. Communication and coordination among inference systems (agents) is achieved through the ability of each agent to transparently and asynchronously reason on inferred knowledge (facts) that might be collected and asserted by other agents on the basis of inference code (rules) that might be either local or transmitted by any node to any other node.

Authors:

• Federico Cabitza
• Bernardo Dal Seno

Keywords:

• Knowledge-Based Systems
• Expert Systems
• Distributed Inference Systems
• Parallel Production Systems
• Ambient Intelligence
• Mobile Agents.

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