CDM Technologies, Inc.

    The Toolkit for Information Representation and Agent Collaboration (TIRAC®) is an application development framework and toolkit for decision-support systems incorporating software agents that collaborate with each other and human users to monitor changes (i.e., events) in the state of problem situations, generate and evaluate alternative plans, and alert human users to immediate and developing resource shortages, failures, threats, and similar adverse conditions. A core component of any TIRAC-based application is a virtual representation of the real world problem (i.e., decision-making) domain. This virtual representation takes the form of an internal information model, commonly referred to as an ontology. By providing context (i.e., data plus relationships) the ontology is able to support the automated reasoning capabilities of rule-based software agents.
 
    Principal objectives that are realized to varying degrees by the TIRAC® toolkit include: support of an ontology-based, information-centric, distributed system environment that limits internal communications to changes in information; ability to automatically 'push' changes in information to clients, based on individual subscription profiles that are changeable during execution; ability of clients to assign priorities to their subscription profiles; ability of clients to generate information queries in addition to their standing subscription-based requests; automatic management of object relationships (i.e., associations) during the creation, deletion and editing of objects; support for the management of internal communication transmissions through load balancing, self-diagnosis, self-association and self-healing capabilities; and, the ability to interface with external data sources through translators and ontological facades.
 
    Most importantly, the TIRAC® toolkit is designed to support the machine generation of significant portions of both the server and client side code of an application. This is largely accomplished with scripts that automatically build an application engine by integrating toolkit components with the ontological properties derived from the internal information model. In this respect, an TIRAC-based application consists of loosely coupled, generic services (e.g., subscription, query, persistence, agent engine), which in combination with the internal domain-specific information model are capable of satisfying the functional requirements of the application field.