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The software architecture of a distributed problem-solving environment

A problem-solving environment (PSE) is a complete, integrated computing environment for composing, compiling, and running applications in a specific area. A PSE may also incorporate many features of an expert system and can assist users in formulating problems, running the problem on an appropriate platform, and viewing and analyzing results. In addition, a PSE may have access to virtual libraries, knowledge repositories, sophisticated execution control systems, and visualization environments.

The uses of PSEs include modeling and simulation, decision support, design optimization, and industrial process management. The main motivation for developing PSEs is that they provide software tools and expert assistance to the computational scientist in a user friendly environment, allowing more rapid prototyping of ideas and higher research productivity.By relieving the scientist of the burdens associated with the inessential and often arcane details of specific hardware and software systems, the PSE leaves the scientist free to concentrate on the science. This paper describes the general functionality and software architecture of a generic distributed PSE. The use of CORBA, Java, XML, and other software technologies is discussed, but this paper's emphasis is on describing the overall functionality of the PSE and on how the different sub-systems of the PSE interact, rather than on implementation details. Implementation details can be found in [ 1 ]. Therefore, some issues of importance in the design of PSEs are not fully addressed in this paper, although a brief reference to them is made in Section 7.2 , with respect to the current PSE infrastructure. These include security and authentication, fault tolerance, debugging, quality control, and validation of software components. The two major parts of the PSE are the Visual Component Composition Environment (VCCE) and the Intelligent Resource Management Sub-system (IRMS). These are described in Sections 2 and 3 , respectively. In Section 4 other aspects of PSEs are discussed, such as the role of ‘intelligence' and mobile agents. Prototype implementations are described in Section 5 . Related research into PSEs is presented in Section 6 . A summary is given in Section 7.

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