Introduction

There are many reasons why we might want to implement or adopt a distributed approach to reasoning in an AI system:

• Humans do it -- psychological models.
• Parallel machines exist - hardware and software.
• Some applications will have improved efficiency and speed up.

  Not all procedures a parallelisable. Indeed many AI procedures being very complex can be hard to parallelise. However, many can benefit from speed on a number of nodes alone. A more formal parallelisation - adopting parallel programming paradigms - is obviously advantageous.

• Modular development of systems -- Easy to build and maintain and add /delete knowledge and reasoning strategies.
• Multiple reasoning techniques -- we can support a variety of techniques some of which might perform better at certain tasks and on certain knowledge.
• Multiple view points -- knowledge required when reasoning could be represented in over many domains.
• Reliability -- if one module fails then the system may still be functional.