The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will result from enabling small companies to enjoy affordable, customized ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. An ERP system is a platform integrating a centralized database with functionalities to support the core business processes. A customized solution can generate substantial efficiency gains, economic savings, and competitive advantage, but this has typically required specialized expertise unavailable to small firms. This project will generate a solution to help small businesses remain competitive. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will build on recent advances in program synthesis to automate software customizations in an ERP. The specific rules and requirements of a company are expressed as a set of easy-to-write declarative rules. The ERP synthesizer will automatically ensure that a combination of tasks is guaranteed to obey all specified rules. This project will build a tool to automate most ERP customizations while minimizing many classes of software errors by construction. This project will also explore the trade-offs of using this system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
