I-X: Technology for Intelligent Systems

I-X is a new systems integration architecture. It is an environment for helping people work together on processes that may be distributed over different geographical locations. I-X supports specification and implementation of best-practice procedures, process management, communication between collaborating agents, management of world state information, access to web services, planning, and option management. It includes:

process panels - similar to to-do lists that people use to plan and monitor processes
a planning system - helps to explore different courses of action using what-if scenarios
a domain modelling tool - to produce a library of best-practice or common ways of doing things
a messaging system to help communication

The building blocks of I-X applications are process panels which provide interfaces to real-world agents. These process panels can be configured to look and behave in ways that suit the application. If more extensive specialisation is required, it is also possible to use extensions and add-ons to further adapt process panels or to develop other kinds of agents that can be included in I-X applications.

Will I-X Help Me?

I-X will bring most benefit to those application areas where different people and/or systems collaborate to solve a complex problem. Although there are plans to make I-X more aware of other aspects of the domain, in its current state of development I-X is concerned with the management and support of processes. Aspects that are well covered by I-X technology are:

intelligent management of to-do lists
exploring alternative courses of action
maintaining world state information
monitoring task execution in real-time
monitoring conditions and effects of activities
communication between remote agents

Currently, inputs and outputs of activities can be represented in I-X, but they fit into I-X less naturally than into other process management methods. Simple object types and state information can be represented and managed in I-X world state descriptions, but to date there is no modelling support for these and it is the user's task to maintain consistency. Future releases of I-X will improve both these issues.

Where to go from here?

I-X Components: This section gives an overview of the general architecture underlying I-X and describes the individual components that constitute the I-X architecture.
I-X Documentation: This section contains the documentation describing how I-X-based agents can be used, how such an agent can be configured, and what APIs are available if programming extensions is necessary.
Downloading and Installing I-X: This section contains the public release of I-X (this version is 4.2) as well as instructions for downloading and installing the software.
Applications: This section contains short descriptions and links to a number of real-world applications that have been built using I-X.
More Background: This section contains more background material about I-X including a commented bibliography and links to related work.

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