Abstract

Large scale Enterprise Information Systems and EnterpriseResource Planning style applications present significant costs and issues during upgrades and as a consequence can lead user organisations to defer potential upgrades. An objective of our meta-data EIS application framework is to significantly reduce these concerns to make new EIS features more redaily available.Our meta-data EIS applications model framework seeks to minimise the majority of these upgrade issues by standardising all update procedures to become an updated stream of sequential meta-data changes, rather than compiled code modules. A key attribute of this update process is the embedded support for Variant Logic, any non code-based changes to the core application logic that may have been added by third parties, analogous to customisations. Logic collision detection is greatly simplified as any potential conflict can be fully identified in advance, reducing any compatibility effort for the Variant Logic.This automated update process also removes the need from vendors to produce version specific update programs, and fully automates the end user's meta-data EIS application update processes. We show that this process combined with the metadata model methodology can support close to an order of magnitude of lifecycle cost savings through successive software generations.

Customizing Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) scale applications can be very expensive, also incurring additional costs during their lifecycle when customizations may need to be re-engineered to suit each EIS upgrade. The ongoing development of a temporal meta-data framework for EIS applications seeks to overcome these issues, with the application logic model supporting the capability for end users to define their own supplemental or replacement application logic meta-data, as what the authors term Variant Logic, to become a variation of the core application logic. Variant Logic can be applied to any defined model object whether visual objects, logical processing objects, or data structures objects. Variant Logic can be defined by any authorized user, through modeling rather than coding, executed by any user as an alternative to the original application logic, and is available for immediate execution by the framework runtime engine. Variant Logic is also preserved during automated meta-data application updates.

Logistics activities require strong information systems and computer support. This IT support requirements has expanded with the advent of ecommerce; utilizing B2B (Business to Business) and P2P (Partner to Partner) ecommerce. There has been an increasing tendency to set up consortia that represent several players in a given field collaborating with one another to form a large logistics consortium in order to form one organization to compete with larger competitors and/or extend beyond their region of operation. This paper deals with the management of collaborative workflow changes in such consortia and the adaptation of these changes to existing workflow systems. We also discuss issues of adaptation to new systems, workflow mining techniques for adaptation and a proposed prototype to capture the meta-data to implement the workflow system.

Abstract-The issue of merging source code based applications is very problematic, particularly when involving code from disparate sources, due to the typical unsuitability of available source code for software merging. The relatively recent field of Model Driven Architecture is primely involved in the definition and development of the source model structures for model based applications and in developing transformations from the abstract models to various executable formats.