  The Blackboard Architecture provides a mechanism for embodying data, decision
making and actuation. Its versatility has been demonstrated across a wide
number of application areas. However, it lacks the capability to directly model
organizational, spatial and other relationships which may be useful in
decision-making, in addition to the propositional logic embodied in the
rule-fact-action network. Previous work has proposed the use of container
objects and links as a mechanism to simultaneously model these organizational
and other relationships, while leaving the operational logic modeled in the
rules, facts and actions. While containers facilitate this modeling, their
utility is limited by the need to manually define them. For systems which may
have multiple instances of a particular type of object and which may build
their network autonomously, based on sensing, the reuse of logical structures
facilitates operations and reduces storage and processing needs. This paper,
thus, presents and assesses two additional concepts to add to the Blackboard
Architecture: common properties and generic rules. Common properties are facts
associated with containers which are defined as representing the same
information across the various objects that they are associated with. Generic
rules provide logical propositions that use these generic rules across links
and apply to any objects matching their definition. The potential uses of these
two new concepts are discussed herein and their impact on system performance is
characterized.
