Architecture of an autonomous distributed system and verification of implementation as a logistics information management system

A host based centralized logistics information management system collects information pertaining to all product inventory, and based on this information, issues order, inquiry and shipping instructions. In the client/server paradigm, these systems are not merely downsized; rather, they are transformed into autonomous distributed systems at each plant in order to satisfy demands for greater utilization of logistic information and closer cooperation with production management information systems. The autonomous distributed system consisting of these several plant systems can, from the perspectives of vendors and sales agents, be expected to behave as a single system. We propose an autonomous distributed architecture for logistics information systems which share an integrated database in real time and use OLE for connecting several systems. We describe a case study of one system in the process of transformation into such an architecture, as a means of verifying the feasibility of implementation