Prerequisites for collaborative problem solving

In order to answer the question whether the “World Wide Web can serve as an infrastructure for business applications in a globally, distributed and collaborative business environment”, one has to step back and address firstly the questions concerning the prerequisites of collaborative problem solving: what is involved in collaborative problem solving in a business context in general and which techniques and what mechanisms available in the Internet can be used to support this task. This paper tries to develop a framework for classification and evaluation of current approaches and to offer perspectives for the development of new infra-structural concepts. 1 Application requirements Suppose that there exists a socio-technical system with a set of actors . The set of actors depends on the actual state of the system at a given time . is used if not a specific state is described. A change in the system may lead to an updated set of actors . An actor may be a human, a robot, a program etc., this will be more precisely specified where needed. A group of actors may be described as single actor, hiding the mechanisms necessary to assign subtasks to individual actors if a tasks is assigned to the abstract actor, representing for example a role or a team. Initially, there is a problem to solve. At a given time , a problem statement describes the state of in a given language . The initial mapping of to is called denotation of a problem. In a business context the problem statement includes the following information at any time: Problem generator , i.e. the actor which first introduces the problem into the system at the time . Published in: Proceedings of WETICE 96, IEEE 5th Intl. Workshops on Enabling Technologies, Stanford, CA, June, 1996 This follows the basic notion of system, as given in [4]. Problem supervisor , i.e. the actor (or group of actors) responsible for the control of the problem solution process [5]. Description of the problem to solve. Additional problem context information: This information is provided with the intent to guide, accelerate and to ease the problem solution process. The context information can include general information (time and space) and environment specific information such as business rules, problem trail, solution related incentives, reference to a case base etc. Problem Statements D Actor Problem to Solve Solved or Rejected Problem Additional Context Information (Case Base, etc)