Scalability of indexing structures in a production systems testbed for computational research

This paper analyzes the scalability of indexing structures in a production systems testbed for large-scale computational research on discrete build-to-order environments. The testbed consists of five integrated services that interoperate for order entry, order promising, production planning, execution, and control. The service-based architecture is Java-based, object-oriented, event-driven, memory-resident, and multi-threaded. Services in the testbed very frequently need to rapidly locate specified elements in their large data models during algorithmic computations, and in that regard a number of indexing structures have been designed by computer scientists with the purpose of increasing the efficiency of data access. We explore the tradeoff between improved application scalability and increased implementation complexity of indexing structures by comparing the B+-tree, T-tree, and R-tree indexing structures to a simple and widely used linear structure in the context of an application to real-time order promising. Scalability is evaluated by measuring space requirements and the computational time as a function of the size of the system.