Performance Control in Very Large Collaborative Information Systems

Collaboration of different information systems with partially redundant database contents may help to decrease response times and to increase availability of the system for query activities. For this purpose these query activities have to be performed redundantly in parallel on databases in different information systems. However, as collaborations are scaling up in the number of participating customers, uncontrolled parallel querying will finally lead to the opposite effect, namely longer and longer waiting time, until the whole collaborating system undergoes thrashing. In this paper we present a novel, natural, analytic pricing scheme for query services which may be used to control the degree of effective redundancy in query activities by way of self-regulation. The pricing scheme is based on the calculation of tailback effects and it binds the prices to actual performance, thus ruling out any deviations of prices from real behavior due to speculative system usage by customers.