Abstract: A data storage and retrieval mechanism includes a base table to store attributes common to each of the customer-specific variants and a spill-over table to store customer-specific attributes for associated individual ones of the customer-specific variants, the attributes of the base table and spill-over table each sharing a common, human readable name-referencing scheme. The customer-specific variants provide for corporate personalization of data storage, retrieval, and input and output operations/presentations as well as workflows that use such data. The name-referencing scheme may utilize multi-part names for data objects and such names may be used by other applications within the hosted environment for creating workflows, visual representations of the workflows, and/or data forms.

Abstract: A scheduling engine and an associated workflow engine may be configured to build workflows that describe sequences of tasks to be performed in a dynamically changing environment. The workflow engine may be configured to monitor the execution of the tasks within the environment and to provide the scheduling engine with information regarding deviations of task executions from the workflows. When such deviations are detected, the workflow engine may trigger the scheduling engine to rebuild the workflows for as yet uncompleted tasks. The scheduling engine may receive the information regarding the deviations via a declarative model of the physical environment. In general, the tasks may be a set of job requests to be processed in a manufacturing environment (e.g., a print shop). Also, the scheduling engine may be made up of an aggregate planner and a detailed scheduler. Aggregate plans for the jobs may be first made for the jobs and then passed to the detailed scheduler for timelining, etc.

Abstract: A directed graph includes a first number of state nodes and a second number of task nodes. The task nodes are interconnected with the state nodes to define one or more paths through the directed graph, each of the paths including an alternating series of one or more of the state nodes and one or more of the task nodes. Thus, any predecessor state node in one of the paths represents a precondition for a subsequent task node along that path. Further, any following state node of that task node represents a result of applying one or more actions that correspond to the task node. The state nodes may be virtual representations of inventory items of a manufacturing environment. Thus, collectively the state nodes may define a bill of materials for the manufacturing environment. Similarly, the task nodes may each define a virtual representation of a manufacturing process within the manufacturing environment. In other words, the task nodes may collectively define routings for the manufacturing environment.