| Abstract: | In this paper, an Object-Oriented Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving Shell (OOCDPSS) with groupware management ability is designed. The groupware management facilities, which satisfy the needs of development and execution of the cooperative distributed problem solving activities, can reinforce concurrency and parallelism, accommodation and integration of heterogeneous, uncoordinated problem solvers cooperating on one common goal. This OOCDPSS system constructs the non-embedded groupware architecture by a hierarchy of leader agents. The leader agent that adopts a distributed blackboard control mechanism can assist the cooperating problem solvers with all the cooperative and coordinative activities at run time through a democratic, contract-net protocol. In this blackboard control mechanism, the system control unit and domain control unit are explicitly separated and put side-by-side in a simple control loop to simplify the control mechanism design. The event messages drive the above control units with the programmable heuristic knowledge, including the static knowledge, procedural knowledge, and strategic, situation-action behavior knowledge. In this OOCDPSS, a completely transparent environment and a programmable distributed blackboard control mechanism are provided. This environment automatically assists and supervises the progress of cooperative problem solving activities at run time, thereby raising the effective level of use among the preexisting problem solvers. In addition, by using the programmable heuristic knowledge, our approach can be efficiently implemented on the cooperative problem solving plans with a range of configurations. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
