Toward a theory and method for cooperative systems, with application to auditing

Cooperative distributed knowledge-base systems—sometime termed distributed artificial Intelligence (DAI)—offer computer methods for coordinating group expertise in the solving of problems. Much of the research to the present has been empirical testing of informal methods. There is a need for more formal methods to guide the design and development of DAI. At the same time, object-oriented programming methods provide a natural means or representing real-world objects in a way that facilitates communication among those objects. In this paper we propose a methodology for integrating formal methods of knowledge theory with object-oriented methods in a way that may facilitate the development of more robust DAI systems. Our exposition takes the reader from conceptual development to fundamentals of an application in auditing.