Distribution of the Propagation System

The goal of this thesis work is to find a distributed solution for the propagation manager of SIES, to improve the throughput and availability of the whole system. SIES is the abbreviation for “Stuttgart Information and Exploration System”. It is an instance of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) in data level in the context of heterogeneous industrial IT infrastructures. Based on the concept of data change propagation, SIES propagates the data changes from source systems to dependent target systems, according to the predefined “dependencies”. This approach has highly saved the development expenses comparing with other EAI approaches. However, as a single-node solution, the throughput of the system is still limited. In previous works, one of the authors demonstrated that the complex propagation process, in which many XML objects processing are involved, is the main reason of low performance. Optimization on the program reduced the average processing time, but did not help a lot to improve the system throughput. To meet the requirements from the industry, an extended, scalable and reliable solution is therefore required for future. This thesis explores possible parallel/distributed approaches for extending SIES, especially Propagation Manager. After comparing alternative solutions, a central load manager based solution is selected, in which congenetic propagation, m-to-n propagation and load balancing are well managed. Based on this, the concept of Propagation Service Unit (PSU) is proposed as a scalable solution for further extension. Evaluation shows that load dispatching algorithms in Load Manager are efficient.