Survey on Goal-driven Architectures

The ultimate aim of advanced IT technology is to provide infrastructures for automated problem solving. Based on machine-readable descriptions, intelligent mechanisms shall enable dynamic usage and combination of available computational resources for solving problems. Therefore, different branches of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research develop frameworks for describing problems and resources along with technologies for automated problem resolution and resource usage. Most commonly, such frameworks center around the service-side that is concerned with how to describe computational resources in order to allow automated usage, and the client-side that is concerned with how to describe the problems to be solved and their resolution process. In order to provide IT technology that reflects real world problem solving in a sophisticated manner, the service- and the client-side should be decoupled to the highest possible extent. Appropriate models for the client-side should allow specifying objectives to be solved from the client’s perspective without regard to their technical resolution, thereby providing sophisticated support for the client-side that is decoupled from technical service usage requests; on the other hand, client-side description elements should encompass all information required for automated problem resolution by intelligent mechanisms for automated resource detection, combination, and usage. Such sophisticated client-side models is what we refer to as goal-driven architectures. Therein a user only specifies the objective or problem to be solved while intelligent mechanisms handle the resolution process automatically. This paper surveys approaches for goal-driven architectures, deriving the state of the art on description models for the client-side that is intended to serve as a basis for developing a goal-driven architecture for Semantic Web Services.