We intend to evaluate the flexibility, automation, and performance of the bus. To evaluate flexibility, we will determine the number of integration scenarios identified by us that can actually be realized in the bus. To evaluate automation, we will determine the amount of bus aware code that needs to be written to interface to the bus. We will also compare this code with the amount of code we have written in our direct interoperation experiments. Furthermore, we will compare the efforts required to interface the client systems using our special collaboration bus and the generic standard Polylith bus used in our VE interconnection experiments. To evaluate performance, we will determine the overhead added by the bus to the response times of the users. An important product of this evaluation will be a set of benchmark collaboration scenarios used in our performance studies.
Once this project this over, a useful follow up project would be to investigate how well it can interoperate other collaboration projects funded under this initiative.