A tailorable software system can continue its evolution after deployment in order to adapt to particular work situation and diverse needs of the users. End-user tailorability has been extensively researched in applied computer science from HCI and software engineering perspectives. Tailorability allows coping with flexibility requirements, decreasing maintenance cost of software products and actively involving users on the process of software development and maintenance. In general, evolving, dynamic or diverse software requirements constitute the need for implementing end-user tailorability in computer systems. In accelerator physics research the factor of dynamic requirements is especially important, due to relatively frequent software and hardware modifications resulting in correspondingly high upgrade and maintenance costs. In this work we introduce the results of feasibility study on implementing end-user tailorability in the software for accelerator physics, focusing mainly on distributed monitoring and data analysis applications. The software prototypes used in this work are based on a generic tailoring platform (VEDICI), which allows decoupling of tailoring interfaces and runtime components. A VEDICI application is represented as a nested hierarchy of compositional markup specifications with the possibility to associate an individual tailoring component with each specification. This approach allows integrating multiple tailoring interfaces within an application instance. While representing a reusable application-independent framework, VEDICI can be potentially applied for tailoring of arbitrary
compositional Web-based applications.
Keywords: Tailorability, Monitoring, Data Analysis, Web-based Systems