Communication protocols for distributed reasoning in expert systems

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.