A Proposed Research Program in Strategic Computing

The Services and Information Management for decision Systems (SIMS) project integrates 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 he or she were dealing with a single entity. SIMS analyzes the user request, plans the necessary sequence of calls on the services and executes them. Until now, the only approach to the problem of software integration has been to build custom systems that support an integrated view of the underlying servers. Such systems are expensive, are suitable only for the application for which they were crafted, are not very flexible with respect to functionality, and are 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.