Research on hierarchical process modeling technology for product development

Product development is the important drive in the creation of social material wealth, and the improvement of human civilization also results in the evolution of product development method. The computer supported collaborative product development represents the trends of modem product development technology. Through the analysis of the existing modeling technologies of collaborative product development process management, a hierarchical process management pattern is presented in this paper. The hierarchical process modelling is composed of the "macro process" and the "micro process" that describe respectively top layer process based task and low layer process based activity for product development project. According to the characteristics of product developing process management, applying task net model in project management technique and hierarchical object-based coloured generalized stochastic Petri net (HOCGSPN) model in workflow management technology sets up the hierarchical models of macro process and micro process. Then the integration technology of macro process based project management and micro process based Workflow management technology for hierarchical process models is researched, which introduces object-oriented technology. The research results show that the hierarchical process models not only simplify the product development process modeling, but also provide distributed project management and Workflow management application tools for collaborative product development. At length, the pressure vessel product development process management in nucleus industry gives a hierarchical process modelling proof.