A COOPERATIVE DISTRIBUTED PROBLEM-SOLVING MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR OFFICE AUTOMATION SYSTEMS

The successful design of cost-effective development and executive envi ronments for Office Automation (OA) depends chiefly on information acc essibility and flexible open system architecture. A groupware manageme nt mechanism-cooperative Distributed Problem-Solving Management Framew ork (CDPSMF) and its application to Office Automation System (GAS) des ign are given. Recurrent group structure is used to characterize an en terprise or organization. Management framework using the Distributed A rtificial Intelligence (DAI) technique and the Object Modeling Techniq ue (OMT), was incorporated into the design of our OA executive environ ment. The following characteristics are emphasized: 1) For the sake of consistent, systematic methodology, we simplify management by conside ring semi-autonomous/modular hardware and software units and also huma n members uniformly, designating them all as Intelligent Agents (IAs). 2) Because problem requesters face a completely transparent working e nvironment, they need merely to state the general problem specificatio ns 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 d esigned. It provides the user with a full set of personalized faciliti es and tools specialized for the user's needs, i.e., the supervision o f progress rates, the arrangement of schedules, CAD, various auxiliary tools, etc. It is also suitable for use as a computerized checkup sys tem so as to raise the whole enterprise performance. A prototype OAS h as been completed and used as project management among our laboratory colleagues.