STRICT - A BLACKBOARD-BASED TOOL SUPPORTING THE DESIGN OF DISTRIBUTED PPC APPLICATIONS

Modem applications (CIM, CSCW, etc.) impose a rapidly increasing demand for very flexible, mostly distributed solutions. This, together with the challenge of Open Systems, assigns more and more importance to the architectural decisions during systems design. However, the capabilities of conventional types of distributed systems seem to be restricted to the lower levels of interprocess cooperation. So, the integration of collaborative software systems calls for intelligent distributed architectures. This paper presents the basic concepts of an experimental 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 is, that architecture which fits the application's requirements best. In that sense the final STRICT system will be definitely more than just a simple advisory tool. It is to serve as an investigation and development environment providing smart facilities to experiment with (DAI-related) architectural knowledge.