A HEURISTIC OPTIMIZATION MODEL OF COORDINATION STRATEGIES FOR CIM DATABASES

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.