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

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.