Knowledge-based customization of enterprise applications

This paper presents a knowledge-based customization system (KBCS) which provides an indispensable tool for the customization and integration of various manufacturing enterprise applications. Business processes and business objects are standardized and packaged into components with the object technology. All components are deployed independently to one another using the object-oriented modeling method. With the aid of the artificial intelligence technique in component selections and integration, the users can generically and rapidly customize their enterprise applications that best fit the business process flow of the enterprise by configuration of those required components only. Therefore, the time and the cost needed for developing complex enterprise applications can be significantly reduced. The capability of the KBCS has been evaluated through a trial implementation in a selected reference site and satisfactory results are obtained. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.