Workflow management for product development process with uncertain and dynamic characteristics

Abstract

Product development process is one of the most important business processes for success of an enterprise and it has special characteristics such as uncertain, evolutionary, iterative, coupled, and project-oriented. Although there have been some modeling approaches of the product development process, they have only defined the process in abstract and conceptual level. This may help to conduct mathematical analysis, but is not enough to support the modeling of processes with uncertain, evolutionary, or coupled characteristics in workflow implementation level. Therefore, it is needed to suggest a workflow modeling method to define product development processes. We analyze in detail the behaviors in the product development processes and figure out the patterns existing in the processes. Dealing with those patterns, we propose an appropriate workflow modeling method to describe detailed behaviors of them. In accordance with the behaviors, we design four representative process templates to microscopically handle workflow elements such as considering data, time, or organization. As each template includes various executable patterns of product development process, we can specify individual workflow patterns with path and time aspect for workflow modeling. Existing workflow enactment paradigms include control flow-based, data flow-based, and “information full” paradigms. Our modeling is basically control flow-based assumed by WfMC but control flow-based modeling is usually not suitable for dynamic or uncertain behaviors. As we apply the approaches that support a less rigid workflow specification through the four process templates related to data container, the concept of data flow-based model is added to our modeling. This hybrid modeling is more suitable for controlling dynamic, uncertain and flexible workflow. This will make great contributions to practical applications. We suggest a formal definition of our modeling based on Graph theory and Set theory. We also...