Workflow-driven design chain management for collaborative engineering of technology-intensive product

Abstract

Due to increasing global competition, collaborative product design is envisaged as the strategy to reduce cost, ensure quality, and shorten time-to-market, especially for technology-intensive products, such as hard disk drives. It can enable teams of designers across enterprise boundaries to address total lifecycle issues at early design phases. In order to support such type of design processes, a distributed collaborative environment is necessary, in which the effectiveness of teams will translate directly to improved cost savings and competitiveness.Workflow management system is a technology that has received much attention in recent years. It can streamline, coordinate and monitor an organizational process involving human and automated tasks spread across multiple enterprises with heterogeneous (existing and new) computing environments. Adopting workflow management technology can greatly improve distributed collaborative design efficiency. In this thesis, a distributed collaborative design framework that is based upon and driven by workflow is presented. Under this framework, the design process can be effectively organized, executed, controlled and monitored at workflow management level, leading to short time-to-market which is a key factor for the success of a new product. The allocation of resources, such as material, human, software, etc., can also be optimized so that the development cost will be lowered.In this framework, process modeling, process dynamics and information exchange are of major concern because these are the basic parts for constructing such a design environment. The process modeling is discussed with respect to process meta-model and organization meta-model. As to the process communication, the asynchronous and synchronous communications involved within intra- and inter-processes are examined. To adapt to the frequent changes occurring in design activities, dynamic process management is proposed to minimize the cost of changing processes. Combined with workflow technology, a workflow-driven communication method supporting process modeling and efficient information exchange between tasks is studied. Furthermore, dynamic workflow is investigated as one major difficulty in implementing this framework.The research work in this thesis has special reference to the design chain activities for development of hard disk drive products at component, sub-system and system levels.