Services and information management for decision support

An overview is given of the SIMS (services and information management for decision systems) project, which integrate several computer services into a single, seamless system, as seen from the user´s perspective. This relieves the user of the need to be familiar with all the services available from the system, enabling the user to make requests as though dealing with a single entity. SIMS analyzes the user request, plans the necessary sequence of calls on the services, and executes them. Custom systems for this purpose are expensive, suitable only for the application for which they were crafted, not very flexible with respect to functionality, and difficult to modify. In contrast, SIMS would allow maintainers to assimilate servers into the system through a much less painful process of building a declarative model of the servers, and allowing the SIMS planner to perform the actual integration task