Expert Systems for Design: The Challenge for SWARM

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key requirements to develop SWARM, or any other agent-based system, as an expert system for engineering design. The paper first discusses a commonly used, agent-based, expert system for design, the blackboard system. There is no control component specified in the blackboard model; this is both its strength and its weakness. The main part of the paper addresses the question “what are the key requirements for distributed control of a blackboard system for design?” The authors identify several key requirements and suggest that such a system could be implemented by modifying the distributed control concept of the CASSANDRA architecture.