Abstract: Disclosed is an invention that provides a knowledge management system that supports inquiries of distributed knowledge resources. Those inquiries may be in the form of questions or problem statements presented by a user. Interaction between a user and the knowledge resources is mediated by a collection of cooperative intelligent agents. The cooperative intelligent agents incorporate generalized automated negotiation and distributed inference (i.e., problem-solving) processes. Using those processes in a hierarchical architecture, the invention analyzes input problem statements and organizes the problem statements as sets of tasks. In pursuit of each task, the invention solicits accessible knowledge repositories, represented by knowledge agents, for relevant knowledge, and then analyzes and integrates responses from those knowledge repositories. The invention may then provide the responses to a human user or a using process.

Abstract: The application of a fault tolerance technique to the intelligent agent technology to create a highly-reliable distributed computing system. The present invention relates to the merger of software fault tolerance techniques to cooperative intelligent agents to provide highly reliable coordination of interactions between computer systems, even when data is corrupt, when available information is incomplete, or when synchronization of the computer systems is imperfect. Agents engaged in an interaction exchange information. Received information is acceptance tested to determine if the information indicates the occurrence of a fault. If the information is outside a range of expected values, or otherwise does not take the form of expected information, a fault is indicated. A fault tolerance technique is employed to overcome the fault. One such technique is the retry block software fault technique. Re-expression and re-transmission of the information may be requested.

Abstract: A flame detector unit contains a silicon photodiode that is sensitive to UV light waves and two lead selenide photoresistors that are sensitive to IR light waves. The electromagnetic bandwidth of each sensor element is restricted by an optical wave filter to pass photons of certain wavelengths characteristic of hydrocarbon flames and to discriminate against photons of other wavelengths. Signals generated by the IR sensors are in the form of variations in electrical resistance of the sensor elements, which together with a resistor network comprise a bridge circuit which combines the two IR signals so as to discriminate against blackbody radiation sources and provide a signal which is fed through an amplifier. Amplified UV and IR signals are fed to a common analog to digital converter (ADC). Output from the ADC is fed to a digital processor through a notch filter, a cluster of weighted-moving-average filters, and into a threshold comparator/tester.