Coordination in CIM: Bringing Database Functionality to Application Systems

Abstract

Coordination in CIM means enforcing dependencies between autonomous application subsystems. We propose an architecture that generalizes multi-database technology and consists of a global coordinator and local specialized agents, one for each subsystem to be coordinated. The agent associated to a subsystem not only monitors relevant subsystem activity but also guarantees certain properties of operations executed in a subsystem. Therefore, it has to provide database functionality for subsystems even in cases they do not rest upon databases. The coordination itself is a synthesis of (advanced) transaction models and workflows. Aside from an introduction to the transactional coordination model, we concentrate in this paper on the analysis of different classes of subsystems and elaborate on properties required from the subsystem and its agent to ensure execution guarantees. Furthermore, we examine to which degree database functionality can be provided for application systems with a given set of properties.

Our examples are taken from an industrial project in the area of computer integrated manufacturing.