ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the system design and to some extent reflects the logical order of the design process. It describes multiprocessor architecture. The selection of the system topology is the first critical design decision. The topology should reflect the characteristics of the problem domain and make the difficult characteristics more manageable. A logically reconfigurable multiprocessor topology was chosen to meet system requirements. The selection of the internal structure of the processing elements is vital for efficient execution of expert system applications. The inference engine in a rule-based system is typically forward chaining or backward chaining. A backward chaining rule-based system can be implemented using a dataflow processing methodology. The inference tree decomposes goals into subgoals which can be independently processed. A priority is assigned to each task processing on the system. Since real-time expert systems interact with an external environment, there is a need for an external interface for communication between the Intelligent Control Units and the environment.
