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software engineering
Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...
, the blackboard pattern is a behavioral design pattern that provides a computational framework for the design and implementation of systems that integrate large and diverse specialized modules, and implement complex, non-deterministic control strategies.
This pattern was identified by the members of the Hearsay-II project and first applied to speech recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...
.
Structure
The blackboard model defines three main components: * blackboard—a structured global memory containing objects from the solution space * knowledge sources—specialized modules with their own representation * control component—selects, configures and executes modules.Implementation
The first step is to design the solution space (i.e. potential solutions) that leads to the blackboard structure. Then, knowledge sources are identified. These two activities are closely related. The next step is to specify the control component; it generally takes the form of a complex scheduler that makes use of a set of domain-specific heuristics to rate the relevance of executable knowledge sources.
Applications
Usage-domains include: * speech recognition * vehicle identification and tracking *protein structure
Protein structure is the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in an amino acid-chain molecule. Proteins are polymers specifically polypeptides formed from sequences of amino acids, which are the monomers of the polymer. A single amino acid ...
identification
* sonar
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances ( ranging), communicate with or detect objects o ...
signals interpretation.
Consequences
The blackboard pattern provides effective solutions for designing and implementing complex systems where heterogeneous modules have to be dynamically combined to solve a problem. This provides non-functional properties such as: * reusability * changeability * robustness. The blackboard pattern allows multiple processes to work closer together on separate threads, polling and reacting when necessary.See also
*Blackboard system
A blackboard system is an artificial intelligence approach based on the blackboard architectural model, where a common knowledge base, the "blackboard", is iteratively updated by a diverse group of specialist knowledge sources, starting with a pro ...
* Software design pattern
In software engineering, a software design pattern or design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in many contexts in software design. A design pattern is not a rigid structure to be transplanted directly into s ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Design Pattern (Computer Science) Software design patterns