Blackboard systems
Flexible Behaviours for Emergent Process Interoperability
WETICE '06 Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises
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The increasingly complex and volatile nature of many contemporary markets means that demands are often best satisfied through dynamic networks of collaborating enterprises Successful collaboration demands tight, flexible integration of business processes, however, this assumes that an appropriate team has been assembled Traditionally, a toplevel service or goal is decomposed into component services or subgoals each of which is then matched to a provider This is a complex task and while automated tools exist, supported especially by the notions of service discovery and traders, significant guidance is typically sought from the user This imposes a substantial burden of interaction and considerable knowledge is demanded of a user to decompose to a level of detail which allows for matching to known services Problems arise if this is not the case and open environments, such as the internet, present additional difficulties: if a user is not up-to-date potential decompositions may be missed; new entrants into a market may not be recognised; etc Bottom-up approaches circumvent some of these difficulties, but also come at a price For example, where goal decompositions are available, these are typically much more inefficient; if there is only a fixed number of processes available within a system, the case of “no solution” may take considerable time to establish Moreover, since many bottom-up approaches distribute control, the system is vulnerable to malicious behaviour Thus, a certain level of trust is required.