Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Preventing environmental pollution and reporting environmental impact is an important task for manufacturing facilities. ERA environmental (ERA) provides software solutions to cope with the challenges that are associated with quantifying the environmental impact and simplifying manufacturing facilities' regulatory reporting. Due to the success of ERA's software solutions, ERA's software is now widely used by companies around the world. An increasing number of companies in various fields are switching to ERA's software solutions. However, such business growth causes several challenges in ERA's database- centric applications: the applications need to be customizable to meet users' needs and easy to maintain. Although the goal of this proposal is to conduct practical research to help ERA solve the aforementioned challenges, such challenges are not unique to ERA. Similar problems exist in other large-scale database- centric applications, and are an important topic in software engineering research and practice.In order to improve the functionality and quality of ERA's database-centric applications, my students and I will develop a series of research techniques and frameworks. The outcomes of this work will advance state-of-the-art in improving the quality of database-centric applications, and improve both the software solutions and the engineering methodology in ERA. By completing this research program, we will help ERA significantly improve the quality and functionality of their database-centric application, and will successfully train 2 PhD and 4 thesis-based MSc students to become experts in the field.