An object - oriented design for modelling business rules in resourceallocation

With the rapid economic restructuring and changes taking place in modern industrial organisations, it is essential that the software system used by a company is able to meet not only the present, but also the future demands of the company. This could be addressed by including strategic knowledge such as business policies and procedures explicitly in the software system development. This paper proposes a resource allocation model which considers the constraints to be satissed by the resource allocation jobs (RAJ) at two levels. The constraints to be satissed by the resource allocation jobs are expressed as the rst level of constraints. The business policies and rules represent the second level of constraints and have been modelled as a wrapper layer of rules (RUG) around the resource allocation jobs objects. The paper shows how this resource allocation model allows an incremental evolution of the system by enabling the behaviour of resource allocation classes to be extended through reuse mechanisms, and how this facility of incremental evolution of systems can be extended to constraints by capturing the dynamic components of the system explicitly as a second level of constraints.