A Model Management Framework for Supporting Departmental Collaborative Work

부서간 협동적 작업을 지원하는 모형관리 체계의 개발

Recently, as business problems become more complicated and require more precise quantitative results, large-scale model management systems are increasingly in demand for supporting the decision-making activities. In addition, as distributed computing over networks gains popularity, departmental computing systems are gradually adopted in an organization to facilitate collaboration of geographically dispersed multiple departments. In departmental collaborative model management systems, multiple departments share common models but approach them with different user-views depending on their departmental needs. Moreover, the shared models become evolved as their structures and the corresponding data sets change due to the dynamic nature of the operating environment and the inherent uncertainty associated with the problems. In such capacity, providing the multiple departmental users with synchronized and consistent views of the models is important to improve the overall productivity. In this paper, we propose a collaborative model management framework for coordinating model change and automatic user-view update in a departmental computing environment. To do so, we describes changes in the model and their effects occurred in departmental model management environments and identifies the constructs and processes for maintaining the consistency between a shared model and its departmental user-views. Especially, in this framework, generic model concept was adopted for accommodating diverse mathematical models in a uniform way in a modelbase and object-oriented database management systems(ODBMS) for combining the model management constructs and automatic user-view update mechanisms in a single formalism. A prototype object-oriented modeling environment was developed using an ODBMS called ObjectStore and $C^{++}$ programming language on Windows NT.