  CRISTAL is a distributed scientific workflow system used in the manufacturing
and production phases of HEP experiment construction at CERN. The CRISTAL
project has studied the use of a description driven approach, using meta-
modelling techniques, to manage the evolving needs of a large physics
community. Interest from such diverse communities as bio-informatics and
manufacturing has motivated the CRISTAL team to re-engineer the system to
customize functionality according to end user requirements but maximize
software reuse in the process. The next generation CRISTAL vision is to build a
generic component architecture from which a complete software product line can
be generated according to the particular needs of the target enterprise. This
paper discusses the issues of adopting a component product line based approach
and our experiences of software reuse.
