Automating the interactions between trusted business partners is a major goal of businesses today. This is often called "supply-chain integration". The intent is to make the businesses more responsive to customer needs and more efficient in their business or manufacturing processes. This paper describes an infrastructure that facilitates the collaboration of trusted business partners to achieve common business goals.

The Jasmin database machine is being implemented as part of a research project in distributed processing and database management A primary goal of the work is to demonstrate the feasibility of a practical multiprocessor database machine suitable for large database, high transaction-rate applications Key features of Jasmin are its configurable performance, its use of off-the-shelf parts, and its ability to handle distributed databases A uniprocessor prototype of Jasmin has already been completed and the multiprocessor version is planned for later this year In this paper we describe Jasmin's architecture and discuss the performance observed in the uniprocessor prototype

In, this paper we argue that if search procedures are to use problem-specific information to direct a search, then they must have complete control over the deductive process. This includes the freedom to select any pair of clauses to interact as well as the freedom to select the literals upon which to attempt the interaction. We give examples to indicate the nature of inference rules which are incompatible with such search procedures. We then present a framework for a search procedure to indicate where problem-specific information may be utilized. Finally, we augment the search procedure to prevent the generation of certain redundant inferences. The augmentation makes use of lemmas to avoid replicating deduction sequences in solving multiple instances of the same subproblem at distinct places in the search space.