Manufacturing Workflow-based Tool Collaboration, Negotiation System

The mould and die virtual enterprise (VE) is one of the most effective means that can rapidly increase the competitive power of the mould and die enterprises of our country under the condition of the existing enterprise resources. It can exert the excellencies and neglect the defects of the mould and die industry. The framework of VE is different from those of the traditional enterprises. Every participator of the VE is equal. The conflict between the participators cannot be dealt with orders but negotiation. As a result, negotiation is one of the critical technologies of cooperation. It is important to the project managers to develop and use the negotiation system that supports all kinds of negotiation workflow.The workflow management technology fulfills the way of people's collaboration. Therefore, it becomes a new hot point of research in the computer field, and is called the software technology of 90th era. Today, the workflow management technology is used to many fields such as office automation, business process, document management, and soon.In this paper, we deeply introduce the condition of workflow technology and the principle of Workflow Management System (WfMS), and recent progress on the research of the reference model and characteristics put forward by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). After that, we analyze the cooperating making workflow of the mould and die by the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The negotiation workflow is investigated deeply. In the end, we model the negotiation workflow using the State-chart diagram of UML.There are more and more software systems that have the Browser/Server (B/S) mode. Because the software systems that have the B/S mode are very convenience to the user, we treat this negotiation system as B/S mode. The database of this system is Microsoft SQL Server. At last, this system is summered and prospected in the paper.