Patent ID: 8482780

Claim:
An information processing device including a processing unit to manage an association processing network formed by a plurality of image processing devices, the processing unit comprising: a service input/output requirement acquiring unit to acquire input/output requirements of services provided by the plurality of image processing devices; a service requirement performance managing unit to store requirement performance information of services registered as association objects in the network; a service evaluation object determining unit to perform a matching process which matches input/output requirements of a service of a device to be newly registered in the network with the input/output requirements of the services already registered in the network, and determines as an evaluation object a combination of input/output requirements used for the service from among all the input/output requirements of the service to be newly registered; a service evaluation content generating unit to acquire requirement performance information of the service to be newly registered from the service requirement performance managing unit, and generate an evaluation content to be evaluated for the service by including the requirement performance information in the evaluation object; a service evaluation unit to evaluate the evaluation content of the service from the service evaluation content generating unit according to a predetermined requirement; and an association object managing unit to register the service as a new association object with the evaluation content the predetermined requirement of which has been met by the evaluation of the service evaluation unit.