DESIGNING A LOCAL COMPUTER NETWORK OF AGRICULTURAL ENTERPRISE BASED ON SIMULATION MODELING

Currently, local-area network and corporate information system are widely used in the management of enterprises, the functioning of which also required the application of the rational organization principles. Purchase, installation and maintenance of an enterprise information system is a high-cost activity. Therefore, the network economic effi ciency, which determines its topology, degree of loading, cost and the software functionality is rather relevant. To design a rationally organized computer network, use can be made of the method of simulation. In this case, the local area network (LAN) is represented as a queuing system with random frequent generation of transactions established in a certain interval in accordance with the planned volume of computer transactions in the enterprise activity. A rationally organized computer network should be characterized by a high load factor of nodes (devices) of the system (personal computers (workstations), servers, switches, routers) with small queues of requests to these devices. Simulation modeling provides not only for developing a model of a computer network and determining its “bottlenecks”, but also conducting experiments with the model to determine its most rational structure. The paper describes the topology and structure of LAN for storage facilities of the agricultural enterprise “EcoAgro” engaged in the cultivation of greenhouse vegetables. Running the model with LAN parameters proposed by the company showed that the network is underutilized, and therefore, ineffi cient. Underutilization of the network increases the cost of production due to high specifi c costs of depreciation and electricity. Based on the conducted experiment with the model, the enterprise was offered, fi rst of all, to purchase less expensive computers with lower performance, and, secondly, to provide access to them for various departments of an enterprise to ensure their increased workload.