FILE AND WORKLOAD ALLOCATION DESIGN FOR DISTRIBUTED DATABASE ON A 2-LEVEL LOCAL MULTIACCESS COMPUTER NETWORK

This paper presents an analytical model to allocate files and workload simultaneously among heterogeneous servers that operate distributed d atabases on a two-level local multi-access computer network. The alloc ation problem is presented in the form of a non-linear integer program ming model. The model incorporates both local processing and data comm unication overhead. The problem is NP-complete and thus a heuristic is developed. To illustrate its suitability, the heuristic is compared w ith an exhaustive enumeration method for small problems and with a gen etic algorithm for large problems. Computational results imply that th e heuristic provide effective database designs. (C) 1997 Elsevier Scie nce Ltd.