Lifecycle and generational application of automated updates to MDA based enterprise information systems

• Authors: Jon E. Davis;Elizabeth Chang
• Venue: Proceedings of the Second Symposium on Information and Communication Technology
• Year: 2011

Large scale Enterprise Information Systems and Enterprise Resource 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.