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Abstract

Collaborative product development (CPD) has been widely accepted as an advanced collaboration paradigm that combines geographically distributed product development teams to develop product collaboratively and efficiently. Interoperability of cross-organizational workflows is important for CPD to facilitate the successful execution of the whole product development process across enterprises boundaries. This article, describes a timed colored petri net (TCPN) and process-view combined approach to construct cross-organizational workflows, and a three models framework of `TCPN workflow models — Process-view workflow models — Integrated process-view workflow model' is proposed to realize the interoperability of cross-organizational workflows for CPD. A multi-agent system PVMAS provides a mediated architecture for distributed workflow management systems interoperability among cooperative enterprises. Under this architecture, a service discovery algorithm is provided for discovering the most suitable services enterprises need, a TCPN algebra model and a character string mapping algorithm are proposed to automate the mapping from a TCPN workflow model to a process-view workflow model, and the synchronization points are designated in the integrated process-view workflow model to coordinate the execution of cross-organizational workflow instances. Finally, a case study of the collaborative development of a motorcycle is presented to verify the validity of our approach for cross-organizational workflows interoperability in CPD.

Keywords

collaborative product development cross-organizational workflows timed colored Petri net process-view multi-agent system.

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Interoperability of Cross-organizational Workflows based on Process-view for Collaborative Product Development

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