A Cooperative Distributed Problem-Solving Management Framework for Office Automation Systems

Abstract

The successful design of cost-effective development and executive environments for Office Automation (OA) depends chiefly on infor mation accessibility and flexible open system architecture A groupware management mechanism— Cooperative Distributed Problem-Solving Management Framework (CDPSMF) and its application to Office Automation System (OAS) design are given Recurrent group structure is used to characterize an enterprise or organization Management framework, using the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) technique and the Object Modeling Technique (OMT), was incorporated into the design of our OA executive environment The following characteristics are emphasized 1) For the sake of consistent, systematic methodology, we simplify management by considering semi-autonomous/modular hardware and soft ware units and also human members uniformly, designating them all as Intelligent Agents (IAs) 2) Because problem requesters face a completely transparent working environment, they need merely to state the general problem specifications and don't need to worry about trivial details such as which IAs are to be used and how they should work together to solve the problem in question 3) An interface or Customized Personal Working Platform is designed It provides the user with a full set of personalized facilities and tools specialized for the user's needs, i e , the supervision of progress rates, the arrangement of schedules, CAD, various auxiliary tools, etc It is also suitable for use as a computerized checkup system so as to raise the whole enterprise performance A prototype OAS has been completed and used as project management among our laboratory colleagues