Coordination among computer integrated manufacturing databases has bec
ome one of the key difficulties in the implementation of an integrated
system. The issue of how to implement interdependency among CIM datab
ases has some alternative technological solutions, trading off various
levels of mutual consistency against various levels of the system thr
oughput. Although these alternatives and their formalization are impor
tant issues in the database theory perspective, this research deals wi
th an engineering issue of devising a methodology to select among thes
e alternatives in any given case. A heuristic optimization model, with
worst time complexity of O(N-2) is presented. Its effectiveness is an
alyzed with a case study and a series of sensitivity analysis activati
ons. This is a first attempt to solve this problem. Our empirical resu
lts show that the overall system performance, as reflected by a system
's goal-function, is substantially improved by the use of our model. r
elative to intuitive or trivial solutions.