Coupling symbolic and numeric programs in large-scale software organizations

This paper describes an environment for building organizations of distributed, collaborating programs. Interaction of dissimilar problem-solving agents (symbolic as well as numeric programs) have been provided for with DPSK, a distributed problem solving kernel. DPSK has evolved from a traditional blackboard architecture to incorporate a number of collaborative mechanisms, called lateral relations, adapted from human organizational theory. This paper traces the evolution of DPSK and describes its principle features.