(26) A Parallel Abductive Reasoning System

We propose a parallel cost-based abductive reasoning system. A search control technique of parallel best-first search is introduced into abductive reasoning mechanism, thereby finding much more efficiently a minimal-cost explanation of a given observation. The parallel abductive reasoning system is running on any UNIX computer networks, while most of existing parallel reasoning systems can run efficiently only on their particular parallel computers. In the system, the KLIC system, a portable and high-performance implementation of a concurrent logic programming language KL1 through translation into language C, is utilized for local reasoning in each processors, and the PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer, is utilized for communication among processors. Good performance results are given by some experiments on the system.