GRATE: a general framework for co-operative problem solving

As the deployment of expert systems has spread into more complex and sophisticated environments, so inherent technological limitations have been observed. As a technique for overcoming this complexity barrier, researchers have started to build systems composed of multiple co-operating components. These systems fall into two distinct categories; those that solve a particular problem, such as speech recognition or vehicle monitoring, and those that are general to some extent. GRATE is a general framework, which enables an application builder to construct multi-agent systems for the domain of industrial process control. Unlike other frameworks, GRATE embodies a significant amount of inbuilt knowledge related to co-operation and control which can be utilised during system building. This approach offers a paradigm shift for the construction of multi-agent systems, in which the role of configuring pre-existing knowledge becomes an integral component. Instead of starting afresh, the designer can utilise the in-built knowledge and augment it, if necessary, with domain-specific information. The GRATE architecture has a clear separation of concerns, and has been applied to real-world problems in the domains of electricity transportation management and diagnosis of a particle accelerator beam controller