Collaborative Design Process Management System Based On Workflow Technology

With the continuous development of the socio-economic, people's demand for products are higher and higher. The focus of competition of the manufacturing sector are changing to developing and producing the right products to meet customers' needs in the shortest time. The complexity of modern products makes the product requires collaborative development. The interaction, collaboration and distribution of production design process are becoming more and more important. So Computer Supported collaborative design emerged. Collaborative design is defined as a problem-solving process for product design targets applying modern design theory and methods supported by the network computer environment. Collaborative design task decomposition, allocation and scheduling, as well as the management of members is a prerequisite to complete product design. So the study of the management of collaborative design process is an important problem during the product collaborative design. The study and application of the collaborative design process management system can improve the efficiency of the entire product collaborative design. Therefore, the study of the collaborative design process management system is of great significance.Collaborative design process management can be researched from the project management at the macro-level and process control at the micro-level. Project management at the macro level, as the organization model of collaborative design, mainly research the project management, task management, user role management. Process control at the micro-management, as the process model of collaborative design, mainly focus on the work-flow management and control of the collaborative design process. This paper studied the collaborative design process management system based on work-flow. The main tasks are: (1) It proposed the framework and the business function model of the collaborative design process management system based on the analysis of the collaborative design process management business process characteristics. (2) From the level of organization and management of collaborative design, it researched the project management, task management, the role-rights management and so on and analyzed the business process and data model of each function on detail and achieved the management of the project and task based on the Hierarchical control theory.(3) Based on work-flow management technology, it researched the process control of the collaborative design process. And it implemented the editing, monitoring execution and automatic flow between tasks of the collaborative design review process using JBPM.(4) Taking a hydraulic excavator as an example, it developed the collaborative design process management system using Web-based B/S three-tier architecture and light-weight framework Struts + Spring + Hibernate of MVC pattern.