Dynamic workflow change in PDM systems

Current manufacturing industry requires product data management (PDM) for efficient product development and production. As an important part of effective PDM solutions, workflow management facilitates creating and executing workflow so as to streamline business processes. Unfortunately, existing workflow management solutions are designed to handle static business processes; when a workflow change occurs, these solutions usually stop the affected workflow completely and start the modified one from scratch. This over-simplified approach leads to reexecution of nodes whose work have been lost due to the restart process. This paper proposes an approach to facilitate efficient dynamic workflow change by minimising repetitive execution of finished workflow nodes. This approach also address the data integrity issue by managing various workflow data such as node properties and scripts. A case study has been carried out in a PDM system to illustrate the potential application of the approach. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.