The subsumption architecture: distributed control for business objects

The goal of enterprise modeling is to capture the structure and operations of a business as simply and directly as possible. The object-oriented approach to enterprise modeling allows us to capture the structure and operations of a business as a collection of interacting business objects. The enterprise model provides us with useful insights into the workings of a business and hence facilitates exercises in business process re-engineering (BPR). The role of BPR is to improve the structure and operations of a business. In this paper, we propose the subsumption architecture as a solution to a class of control problems which arise in BPR efforts. The subsumption architecture is ideally suited to implementation in the distributed computing environment, yielding a scaleable, high-performance solution which is particularly robust under exceptional conditions.