A decision support method for the selection of OMSs

With the increasing demand for highly complex, integrated and application-domain-specific systems engineering environments (SEEs) more or less specialized components of the SEEs are developed. An important component is the database management system (DBMS). As conventional DBMSs are not useful to fulfill the requirements on highly complex, persistent data structures, specialized DBMSs, namely object management systems (OMS), have been developed. An advantage of OMSs is that they further enhance the integration not only of data but also of processes. Currently several specialized OMSs with significantly different properties such as the data model, architecture and performance are available. As it is very difficult for an SEE developer to select the most appropriate OMS, the authors propose a decision support method which enables an SEE developer to identify his requirements and to compare the evaluation results of different OMSs. Additionally they present a practical experiment where they apply the decision support method for comparing different OMSs