Experience with a Functional-Logic Multi-Agent Architecture for Medical Problem Solving

Abstract

The present paper reports on our experience with applying RELFUN (Boley, 1999) to problems in distributed medical care. This application arose “externally” in the original sense of the word: Massimiliano Campagnoli, working with the LISP-based expert-system shell KEE, supporting frames as well as forward and backward rules, noticed RELFUN on the net and switched to it, since frames are mappable into clauses and RELFUN’s rules offer more versatility than KEE’s. After his initial implementation of a RELFUN-based distributed medical-care system, he contacted the second author, further developing RELFUN, and the Pavia/Kaiserslautern teams joined forces, with the first author also being the expert in the medical domain.