A real-time synchronization mechanism for collaborative model management

Abstract

As mathematical models are increasingly adopted for corporate decision-making, problems arise in departmental information sharing and collaboration around model management systems. When multiple departments are involved in decision-making problems, it is necessary to consider the individual conditions of the multiple departments as a whole from an entire organizational perspective. However, in functionally decentralized organizations, the operational data is usually dispersed in individual departments, thus, the departmental decisions are made separately on the basis of limited information and perspective. This paper proposes an object-oriented data model for developing a collaborative model management system that facilitates not only sharing mathematical models among multiple departments, but also coordinating and propagating ongoing changes in the models on a real-time basis. A prototype system is developed at KAIST on a commercial object-oriented database system called ObjectStore using C++ programming language. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.