STRICT - A BLACKBOARD-BASED TOOL SUPPORTING THE DESIGN OF DISTRIBUTEDPPC APPLICATIONS

Modem applications (CIM, CSCW, etc.) impose a rapidly increasing deman d for very flexible, mostly distributed solutions. This, together with the challenge of Open Systems, assigns more and more importance to th e architectural decisions during systems design. However, the capabili ties of conventional types of distributed systems seem to be restricte d to the lower levels of interprocess cooperation. So, the integration of collaborative software systems calls for intelligent distributed a rchitectures. This paper presents the basic concepts of an experimenta l advisory system called STRICT (Selecting The RIght architeCTure). In the long term the STRICT project aims at developing a tool supporting the selection of the ''right'' (Distributed AI-) architecture, that i s, that architecture which fits the application's requirements best. I n that sense the final STRICT system will be definitely more than just a simple advisory tool. It is to serve as an investigation and develo pment environment providing smart facilities to experiment with (DAI-r elated) architectural knowledge.