We. are going to describe the design and implementatior, of a connnuniealion system l.or large AI projects, capable of supporting various software components in a heterogeneous hardware and programming-language environment. The system is based on a roodification of the channel approach introduced by Hoare (1978). It is a threelayered approach with a de facto standard network layer (PVM), core routines, and interfaces to live different programming languages together with SUl)port l.or the transparent exchange of complex data types. A special component takes over: name service functiorrs. It also records the actual configuration of the modules present in the application and the created channels. We describe the integration of this communication facility in two versions of a speech-to-speech translation system, which ditfer with regard to quality and quantity of data. distributed within tire applications and with regard to the degree of interactivity involved in processing.
Jan W. Amtrup, Jörg Benra