A MULTIPLE CRITERIA MODEL FOR THE ALLOCATION OF DATA FILES IN A DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEM

Scope and Purpose-The file allocation problem to determine the allocation of data files in distributed computer systems has been extensively studied in the literature. This problem has been known to be complex and challenging because of a variety of design settings. The major objective of this paper is to present a multiple criteria formulation of the file allocation problem in which design objectives are often in conflict. A computational procedure for the resulting difficult problem is further explored. Abstract-This paper addresses a multiple objective optimization model to determine the file allocation and query routing assignment in a distributed information system. The problem is formulated as a zero-one integer nonlinear programming problem with multiple objectives. The optimization problem under consideration is shown to be NP-hard. We adopt an iterative improvement procedure, which gives the Pareto optimal solution. We further illustrate our methodology with a small sample system. 1