Network Of Collaborative Work Systems, Workflow Modeling And Simulation Technology

With the coming of the network age representative of Internet, the networked manufacturing will be the inevitable trend of the future manufacturing. As the platform of the networked manufacturing, the networked collaborative work system is greatly emphasized. The research of workflow technology, which effectively supports the networked manufacturing, will be beneficial to the enterprise to shorten the product development time, improve the quality of the product, reduce the cost and improve the quality of the service, thereby enhance the competition capability.In this paper, the architecture of workflow management system is given to meet the requirements of the application in the networked collaborative work system, which establishes the strong foundation for the further research.Workflow Modeling is the base for implementing the workflow management. Using the theory of General stochastic Petri nets, the factors of resource, object and hierarchy are introduced to set up model of Hierarchical Object General Stochastic Petri Nets( HOGSPN). As to the problems of workflow model, such as deadlock, trap, safeness etc., various analysis techniques are discussed and the realization algorithms are given.The simulation based on the Petri net model is an effective tool to verify workflow model, evaluate system performance and optimize model. Considering the feature of HOGSPN model, the project, the strategy, the performance metrics of the workflow simulation are put forward, and the solutions to key problems are presented.Based on HOGSPN model, a visual modeling and simulation tool based on Web is developed by Object-Oriented analysis and design, and the techniques of XML and database are used in the data management. Finally a concrete example is illuminated to show the application of this tool.