Chapter 4: Collaborative Product Development

Title: A dynamic workflow management system to support cooperation in the extended enterprise

Author(s): Michele Germani, Marco Mandolini, Maura Mengoni

Address: Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche 12, 60131, Ancona, Italy | Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche 12, 60131, Ancona, Italy | Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Via Brecce Bianche 12, 60131, Ancona, Italy

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2010 pp. 215 - 225

Abstract/Summary: Collaborative product development (CPD) has been widely accepted as an advanced collaboration paradigm that combines geographically distributed product development teams to efficiently achieve a common goal. Dynamic cross-organizational workflows are important for implementing CPD as they facilitate the execution of process tasks and handle unpredictable events occurring when multiple partners collaborate. This research work aims at designing and developing an innovative dynamic workflow manager (DWM) based on the distributed process knowledge to classify exceptions, to detect proper solving actions and workflow rules and finally, to keep the workflow running under different conditions. The core of the DWM is a knowledge-based repository. Preliminary experimentations are carried out in order to identify main system advantages and critical issues.

Order a copy of this article