Abstract:The recent surge of interest in connectionist models arose through the availability of high speed parallel supercomputers and the advent of new learning algorithms. The computations performed on concurrent architectures are less costly than similar ones performed on sequential machines. In this paper, the design and implementation of a parallel version of fuzzy ARTMAP (Carpenter et al. 1992), which encompasses both neural and fuzzy logic, is discussed. Fuzzy ARTMAP is a supervised learning algorithm utilising two fuzzy ART modules and an associated mapping network. A simplified version of fuzzy ARTMAP (SFAM) was designed by incorporating a simplification of the match tracking concept on unsupervised fuzzy ART paradigms. The proposed simplified version consists of only one fuzzy ART module and an associated mapping network. A parallel fuzzy ARTMAP (PFAM) algorithm is then designed and implemented on a hypercube simulator (iPSC). The algorithm is parallelised for any architecture and, with the exception of issues related to communications, the implementation remains the same on any type of parallel machine. PFAM enjoys the advantage of reduced training time that makes the algorithm a successful candidate for applications that require both online testing and training. Such applications can range from underwater sonar detection and chemical plant processing control to nuclear reactor process control, flexible manufacturing and systems analysis.