A distributed Workflow Management System for Collaborative Product Development

Collaborative Product Development (CPD) has been widely accepted as an advanced paradigm to combine geographical distributed project teams to develop more competitive products. However, the process management for CPD is still a challenging research issue due to the distributed and dynamic nature of the problem currently. At the base of our previous study on process-view approach for inter-enterprises workflows, a P2P based and Web services-oriented distributed Workflow Management System (WMS) is built in this paper, which provides a scalable and flexible architecture for CPD process management. At last, the collaborative development of the motor, clutch and frame of an automobile is given as the case study, to validate the built distributed WMS.