A BPEL-based service-oriented dynamic collaborative mechanism for distributed product design

Product design is now concerned with various domains, knowledge, processes and tools, and has become much more geographically dispersed, causing the communication and cooperation to be complicated and dynamic. Hence, a shared and autonomous collaborative platform becomes a very crucial issue. Services, as the prominent paradigm for distributed computing, are adopted for developing geographically distributed, collaborative and evolvable systems. Especially, grid services presents a feasible method to solve the problems of sharing heterogeneous resources seamlessly. Thus, service-oriented computing has received much interest from industry and academic research communities to support collaborative work or business-to-business integration. However, a lack of elaborate coordination mechanisms and the dynamic environment of application deter the widespread application of service-oriented technology. There is a need for dynamic collaborative mechanisms to enable distributed product design in a manner that ensures that design activities and processes are planned and executed in an efficient, controlled method. This paper reports on a dynamic collaborative mechanism to facilitate collaborative work in distributed product design with Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and service-oriented computing. The mechanism focuses on how to build and manage the dynamic collaborative process for different partners involved in distributed product design. With the support of Grid toolkit, a prototype system is built and evaluated with a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed mechanism.