Distributed and Collaborative Soft Computing: An Emerging Development Environment

There is a rapidly emerging need to deal with distributed sources of data (sensors, Web sites, databases). By recognizing their limited accessibility while acknowledging benefits of pursuing collaborative processing, we propose a concept of a distributed and collaborative framework of computational intelligence (CI). The variety of possible mechanisms of interaction is organized into a setting of the C³ (communication - collaboration -consensus) paradigm. This helps us offer taxonomy of various schemes of interaction which in the sequel leads to a suite of detailed algorithms. The role of granular information and granular computing in the establishing the mechanisms of interaction is emphasized and investigated