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, cooperating components. These systems tend to fall into two distinct categories: systems which solve a particular problem, such as speech recognition or vehicle monitoring, and systems which 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 cooperation frameworks, GRATE embodies a significant amount of inbuilt knowledge related to cooperation 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 preexisting knowledge becomes an integral component. Rather than starting from scratch the designer can utilise the inbuilt 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.