Toward a distributed collaborative human-centric decision-making system: An information grid approach

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.