Toward a Distributed Collaborative Human-Centric Decision-Making System: An Information Grid Approach Waleed W. Smari Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Dayton 300 College Park, Dayton, Ohio 45469 Waleed.Smari@notes.udayton.edu Seung-yun Kim Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Dayton 300 College Park, Dayton, Ohio 45469 Kimseung@notes.udayton.edu William K. McQuay Air Force Research Laboratory Wright-Patterson AFB OH (AFRL/IFSD) 2241 Avionics Circle, WPAFB, Ohio 45433 William.McQuay@wpafb.af.mil Ashish Godbole Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Dayton 300 College Park, Dayton, Ohio 45469 Godbolas@notes.udayton.edu Abstract – Advances in computer science and communication technologies have helped people, businesses, and organizations interact faster and easier than ever before. In the future, computers will be required to play a lot more active role in performing a wide range of activities, such as collaboration, decision-making, task automation, data and information management, and so on, to create and share knowledge while assisting users in performing tasks. Computers will have to be a seamless and transparent part of our environment, and their design will have to concentrate as much on human centeredness as on other aspects of the system. Tomorrow’s computer based environments will require an optimal integration of decision-making, knowledge management, and human computer interaction aspects. They will also need to be truly pervasive and ubiquitous in nature. The main goal of this paper is to propose an Information Grid-based approach towards realizing such human-centric computing systems in a distributed environment, in order to facilitate collaboration, knowledge sharing, and distributed decision-making, at both local and global levels. The proposed framework is a layered approach that incorporates decision making, human centeredness and knowledge management at various points in the architecture. A first step towards the implementation of such a system is also proposed by incorporating the HUDS architecture [16] in a grid-based scenario. This implementation incorporates four important properties, namely, pervasiveness, awareness, autonomicity, and human factors in order to make the system human centric in nature. Keywords – Information Grid, P2P Networking, Collaboration Science, Knowledge Management, Decision Making, Human Computer Interaction. I. INTRODUCTION The advent of networked computing and the Internet coupled with recent advances in human computer interaction, have enabled a variety of users, businesses and organizations to interact and work efficiently while being geographically separated [8, 24]. These recent advances and enabling technologies are likely to culminate in the development of truly pervasive human centric computing environments. Such environments would require a distributed computing platform that has the ability to support many kinds of users working in various types of physical environments. This platform would be required to support a variety of applications and services such as decision making, knowledge management and sharing, etc. It would also be required to provide effective collaboration, coordination, and communication between users and machines, and machines and machines. Currently, very few architectures have the potential to be used as a robust network and communications base for the development of future distributed human centric systems. These are the client-server, and the peer-to-peer architectures. The first is the most popular and widely used architecture today. The second is in various stages of development and use, with a variety of applications ranging from file sharing to massively parallel problem solving. Grid Computing [4], which may employ these two models, offers a lot of promises because it does not have the disadvantages and bottlenecks that are inherent in other existing high performance computing strategies. In this paper, we focus on one type of the grid architecture, the Information Grid [13]. It is a good example of an environment that has the capability of providing many of the aforementioned services. Within such an environment, users and organizations would have the ability to share information, take vital decisions, collaborate and communicate with groups working remotely without the need for personal meetings [22]. This approach and possible implementations are discussed in detail in Section II. In addition to the requirement of a robust networking and communications infrastructure, there are three main challenges in most existing systems. First, many are not integrated systems, i.e., they are application specific and concentrate either on decision-support, or knowledge sharing but not both (e.g., Banxia 1 , Ergo 2 , Group explorer 3 , and 1 http://www.banxia.com 2 http://www.arlingsoft.com