Large Scale Enterprise Information System Architectures and Coordination Methods

The large scale enterprise information systems are usually consisted of many subsystems or modules. Coordination among subsystems or modules is an important problem in developing and integrating information systems. In this paper, we classify coordination into control coordination and data coordination. From the view of centralization/decentralization of control/data, we present four kinds of enterprise information system architectures, including centralized control-centralized data, centralized control-decentralized data, decentralized control-centralized data, and decentralized control-decentralized data. Some typical coordination methods are discussed. For control coordination, we present hierarchical coordination, guiding coordination, cyclic coordination and grouping coordination methods. For data coordination, we present P2P coordination, bus based coordination, flow coordination and virtual data space based coordination methods. These coordination methods can be used according to different enterprise information system architectures.