Web service-oriented collaborative workflow management for design and manufacturing.

摘要

The web technology has been allowing the formation of "virtual" organizations to handle wide range of design and manufacturing process. Many collaborative systems can coordinate distributed processes among manufacturers, and the Web service technology can provide more scalable and flexible collaborative workflow management in such systems. The manufacturing processes of each collaborative system can be posted as a globally-understandable service by using Web service technology and used by other systems. The service-oriented process model provides the fundamental foundation of globally-acceptable representation and management for distributed processes as services. In this model, the OWL has been used to represent the process and describe execution status of process in this model. The Web service-oriented process model has been successfully deployed in the Manufacturing Integration and Design Automation System (MIDAS). The authoring environment of MIDAS enables users to create and advertise the OWL process definitions, and deploy Web services for those process definitions. The execution environment of MIDAS enables users to search, select and execute the posted process by using Web service.