A Scheme-Based System for Boolean Reasoning.
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to develop a software system which supports inference and arithmetic operations on knowledge represented as Boolean equations. The goals of this research are: (1) To develop a set of toolbox procedures, extending a the Scheme programming language to include Boolean algebraic and inference operations; (2) To explore and compare several different methods of representing knowledge expressed as a system of Boolean equations. Sphinx is an extension to the Scheme language enabling algebraic and deductive manipulation of knowledge expressible as Boolean equations. The implementation of Sphinx consists of four packages of procedures each reading within a seperate environment. Three packages implement abstract data types, each isomorphic to a Boolean algebra whose elements are Boolean functions, using different data structures to represent Boolean functions. These structures include Lisp S-Expressions, explicit sums of products and extended Boolean expansion trees. The fourth package implements translations between strings and Boolean functions. The performance of each representation with regard to various function manipulations is analyzed. An example application, the fault diagnosis of combinational circuits is demonstrated.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 08, 1986
- Accession Number
- ADA177605
Entities
People
- Mark L. Fausett
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology