Consensus system for solving conflicts in distributed systems

By a data conflict in a distributed system we understand a situation (or a state of the system) in which the system sites generate and store different versions of data which represent the same subject (problem solution, event scenario, etc.). Thus in purpose to solve this problem the management system should determine one proper version for the data. The final data version is called a consensus of given versions. In this paper for given conflict situation we propose to solve a consensus problem by means of a consensus function. We present elements of a consensus system, the postulates for consensus choice functions, their analysis and algorithms for consensus determining. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.