A distributed artificial intelligence approach to object identification and classification

This paper presents an application of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) tools to the data fusion and classification problem. Our approach is to use a blackboard for information management and hypotheses formulation. The blackboard is used by the knowledge sources (KSs) for sharing information and posting their hypotheses on, just as experts sitting around a round table would do.The present simulation performs classification of an Aircraft(AC), after identifying it by its features, into disjoint sets (object classes) comprising of the five commercial ACs; Boeing 747, Boeing 707, DC 10, Concord and Boeing 727. A situation data base is characterized by experimental data available from the three levels of expert reasoning. Ohio State University ElectroScience Laboratory provided this experimental data. To validate the architecture presented, we employ two KSs for modeling the sensors, aspect angle polarization feature and the ellipticity data. The system has been implemented on Symbolics 3645, under Genera 7.1, in Common LISP.