A model-based method to design an application common platform for enterprise information systems

This paper presents a model‐based method to design a software development platform for enterprise information systems. We call it an application common platform, ACP. ACP wraps existing reusable software assets to hide their details from application developers and provide domain level API (Application Programming Interface), so that reusability of software assets and productivity of applications are improved. In this paper, we present a software architecture which organizes applications, ACP, and software assets and illustrate the development of ACP. In particular, we present transformation rules used to derive ACP design models from both application design models and software assets design models. We have evaluated our proposed method through case studies of the development of enterprise information systems. Our proposed method was found to reduce development costs by 20% compared to the estimated costs. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 176(3): 37–51, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.21166