Pergamon Expert Systems With Applications, Vol. 9. No. 3. pp. IV-V, 1995

Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in the USA

PatentsALERT

This section contains abstracts of recently issued United States patents and published patent applications filed from over 30 countries under the Patent Cooperation Treaty and compiled in accordance with interest profiles developed by the Editors.

PARALLEL PROCESSING APPARATUS

5404472

AND MEI’HOD CAPABLE OF SWITCHING PARALLEL AND SUCCESSIVE

PROCESSING MODES

Kurosawa Kenichi; Tanaka Shigeya; Nakatsuka Yasuhiro; Bandoh Tadaaki Hitachi, JAPAN Assigned to Hitachi Ltd

When executing successive processing of conventional software, a parallel processing apparatus turns a process- ing state discrimination flag off, increases a program count by 1 at a time, reads out one instruction, and processes that instruction in an arithmetic unit. When executing par- allel processing for new software, the parallel processing apparatus turns the processing state discrimination on, increases the program count by m at a time, reads out m instructions, and exercises parallel processing over m in- structions in m arithmetic units. In order to select either of the above described two kinds of processing, a discrimi- nation changeover instruction having function of chang- ing over the processing state discrimination flag is added. Instructions are processed in arithmetic unit(s) in accord- ance with the processing state discrimination flag. In this way, successive processing and parallel processing are provided with compatibility and are selectively executed.

5404503

HIERARCHICAL DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE BASED MACHINE

INITITATED MAINTENANCE SYSTEM

Hill Fletcher L; Jurestovsky Nancy; Holm Douglas A; Pinkham Gregory A Golden, CO, UNITED STATES Assigned to Stor- age Technology Corporation

The hierarchical distributed knowledge based system func- tions in a machine initiated maintenance environment to provide efficient and timely maintenance of customer equipment. The hierarchical, distributed knowledge based system provides the failure evaluation function through

the use of an expert or knowledge based system that is installed in the customer equipment. The knowledge based system makes use of a set of rules and hypotheses to oper- ate on data collected from various points within the cus- tomer equipment to monitor the operational integrity of the customer equipment. This knowledge based system identifies the occurrence of a failure within the customer equipment and functions using its rules, hypotheses and collected data to isolate the source of the error in the cus- tomer equipment and, whenever possible, fence or isolate the failed field replaceable unit that has caused the error. A significant additional attribute of this system is the pro- vision of at least one more level of knowledge based sys- tem to provide a more global failure evaluation capabil- ity.

5404506

KNOWLEDGE BASED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

Fujisawa Hiromichi; Cohn David; Hatakeyama Atsushi; Kiuchi Itsuko Tokorozawa, WA, JAPAN Assigned to Hitachi Ltd

An information retrieval system with good human-interface methods to give the system ease-of-use having two distinctive features with the first being visual interface and the second being natural language interpre- tation. The visual interface provides for visual interaction for local search and natural language interpretation pro- vides for linguistic interaction for global search. The visual interface provides versatile views onto the contents of the knowledge base that the system has, controlling mecha- nisms for browsing through the knowledge base, a capa- bility of showing relevant information for the users, and a mechanism for editing a query expression that describes information to retrieve. By using the visual interface for information retrieval, the users can easily create query ex- pressions, by consulting and reacting with the system. The natural language interpretation makes use of a conceptual network as a knowledge-base that stores important con- cepts and relationships among these concepts. Based on knowledge and information represented in the conceptual network, the meaning of a noun phrase or a nominal com-

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