Autonomous assurance technique in distributed database using mobile agent

Abstract

Due to information technology advances, the business environment and user requirements are rapidly changing, and companies have been trying to cooperate among themselves to cope with the dynamic market. However, in an integrated system such as supply chain management (SCM), they have to coexist without violating their own requirements of real-time property and fault-tolerance under the evolving situation. That is, these integrated systems should be assured for their own characteristics. In order to realize the system, each of which has its own database (DB), with heterogeneous requirements-real-time property and fault-tolerance, an assurance system architecture is proposed. In this system architecture, each system has autonomy to manage access to the DB in cooperation with other systems through an autonomous mobile agent (MA). This MA has an "allowable volume" which means each system can update its DB independently, and the MA allocates the AV into systems by moving around them dynamically. While data consistency is achieved in this system architecture, the effectiveness of this assurance system is experimentally shown with the SCM system.