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 [11]. 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 [7], [9], [11]. The enterprise model provides us with useful insights into the workings of a business and hence facilitates exercises in business process re-engineering (BPR) [7]. The role of BPR is to improve the structure and operations of a business. In this paper, we propose the Subsumption Architecture [2] 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.