OMNI-a heterogeneous distributed advice giver

The author presents an architecture for heterogeneous, distributed problem solving and describes work in progress on an application called OMNI, aimed at giving advice to users of enterprise level computing systems. Since OMNI´s domain is too large to be manageable by any single intelligent program, the author employs a distributed problem-solving approach in which a heterogeneous collection of existing specialists is used to solve a user´s problem. Participation among these various systems is accomplished through a blackboard and a set of contracts. The author uses a general practitioner with a high-level model of the domain to encourage coordination among specialists. Model based reasoning is intrinsic in OMNI; it allows interaction based on an understanding of the domain which is not possible in any purely syntactic scheme