How to Improve the Efficiency of Collaborative Product Development

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1 A workflow enabled distributed collaboration environment for development of complicated products Ping Jiang, Yang Yang, Ling Kuang, Xinyu Shao, Liping Zhang State Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment & Technology, Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Wuhan , China Phone: ; Abstract The development of complicated products needs the collaborative working among cross-organizational and multidisciplinary engineers adopting various geographical distributed design resources (such as CAD/CAE tools and private procedures). Facilitating the information sharing and exchanging among these heterogeneous design resources is the foundation to implement the collaborative product development, and has been researched deeply and widely. However, how to improve the efficiency of distributed collaboration is still a hard problem, and the development and implementation of new methodologies and technologies are imperative to tackle this challenge. In this paper, a workflow enabled distributed collaboration environment is developed for complicated products at the base of our previous studies, to improve the collaboration efficiency. In the developed environment, all the cooperative enterprises are connected in a P2P network, and the collaboration process of complicated products development is modeled in cross-organizational workflows, and then the cooperative execution of these cross-organizational workflows is implemented to facilitate all the activities in the product development process to be finished collaboratively. At last, the collaborative development of Small Water-Plane-Area Twin Hull (SWATH) is chosen as the case study to show the actual operation of the developed distributed collaboration environment. Keywords: collaborative product development; workflow; multidisciplinary optimization; P2P 1. Introduction The development of complicated products needs the collaboration among cross-organizational and multidisciplinary engineers adopting various geographical distributed and heterogeneous design resources (such as CAD/CAE tools and private procedures). At the same time, fast development of Internet and communication technology (ICT) facilitates the collaboration among enterprises. Currently, Collaborative Product Development (CPD) across enterprises has been recognized as an advanced strategy to combine geographical distributed project teams to develop more competitive products. Facilitating the information sharing and exchanging among lots of distributed and heterogeneous design resources is the foundation to implement the collaborative product development, and has been researched deeply and widely [1]. However, how to improve the efficiency of distributed collaboration is still a hard problem, and the development and implementation of new methodologies and technologies are imperative to tackle this challenge. Workflow technology is widely adopted to automate business processes by coordinating and controlling the flow of work and information between participants [2]. The process of CPD is a kind of typical cross-organizational workflows, so the workflow technology is one of the important enabling technologies for CPD, to improve the efficiency of distributed collaboration. Some literatures on cross-organizational workflows management have been reported [3-6]. The process-view approach was proposed to facilitate B2B workflow interoperability [7-10], and has been argued as the most promising solution for cross-organizational workflows management [11]. In our previous studies, the process-view and Petri nets combined approach was proposed and a distributed Workflow Management System (WMS) for CPD was built [12-15]. As a continuous study, a workflow enabled and P2P based distributed collaboration 447

2 environment for CPD was implemented in this paper, which provides a scalable platform for the collaborative development of complicated products. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 analyzes the characteristics of CPD oriented cross-organizational workflow, and introduces the process-view approach based cross-organizational workflow management. The workflow enabled and P2P based distributed collaboration environment is presented in Section 3. Section 4 introduces a case study of the collaborative development of the Small Water-Plane-Area Twin Hull (SWATH), to show the actual operation of the developed distributed collaborative environment. The conclusion and future work is presented in Section CPD oriented cross-organizational workflow The CPD oriented cross-organizational workflow usually consist of lots of activities belong to different cooperative enterprises, and some of these activities maybe further decompose into sub-workflow in the cooperative enterprises. Figure 1 describes a workflow of CPD, and all activities in the workflow separately belong to three cooperative enterprises, i.e. enterprise A, B and C. In a CPD project, due to these cooperative enterprises are individual economic entities, the inner workflow of each cooperative enterprise are private and can only be partly revealed to outside. The remarkable characteristics of CPD oriented workflow are as follows [12]: Autonomic versus collaborative The workflows in cooperative enterprises are autonomic, however, these workflows should be collaboratively execute to jointly complete the CPD project. Distributed versus interrelated The workflows in cooperative enterprises are geographical distributed, however, these workflows should be interrelated to jointly form the whole workflow of CPD. Stable versus dynamic The workflows in cooperative enterprises are stable, and have become the core competence of enterprises. However, the workflow of CPD is dynamic due to the instant cooperative relationships among enterprises and quickly changed market environment. Fig 1. The workflow of CPD Facilitating the reusability of workflow models in cooperative enterprises and the interoperability among existing WMSs of cooperative organizations is vital to cross-organizational workflows management, which avoids the troublesome remodeling of workflow. In the process-view approach, the private workflow of an enterprise can be mapped to process-views to encapsulate sensitive business details and expose necessary business to partner enterprises according to cooperative requirements, and the process-views act as workflow interoperability interfaces to realize cross-organizational workflows collaboration while keeping autonomy of cooperative enterprises. The process-view approach provides a promising way to reuse the existing workflow models and WMSs of cooperative enterprises to manage 448

3 cross-organizational workflows of CPD. In order to enhance the capacity of workflow modeling of the process-view approach, our previous studies combined the process-view approach with Petri nets to manage CPD workflow, and a distributed WMS was built, more details can be referred to literatures [12-15]. 3. The workflow enabled and P2P based distributed collaboration environment In order to effectively support the collaborative development of complicated products, a distributed collaboration environment need be built. The necessary functions owned by the collaboration environment are listed as follows: The Virtual Enterprises (VE) can be dynamically constructed for CPD project. Support the timely sharing and exchanging of design information among various distributed and heterogeneous design resources in VE. WMSs in cooperative enterprises can run synchronously to ensure that the whole CPD workflow execute collaboratively and smoothly in the VE. The distributed collaborative environment should be easily extended to adapt to the quickly changed market environment. The P2P architecture can facilitate the sharing of computer resources and services by direct exchange between systems [16], which is flexible to extend to future users, when more users join the collaborative environment, it will not significantly impact the performance of the data sharing. At the same time, the P2P architecture typically integrates heterogeneous nodes [17]. So, the P2P architecture provides a new and promising paradigm to build the distributed collaboration environment. Super Peer CAD/CAE Tools Design Resources Analysis Tools & Codes Optimization Tools & Codes Project Database Collaborative Product Development Platform VE Managment Workflow System VE Index UDDI WFPN-PV system ActiveVOS Designer Collaborative Reviewing Tool- CollabVue JXTA/SOAP Adapter JXTA Network Interfaces Participant Peer JXTA/SOAP Adapter Participant Peer JXTA/SOAP Adapter Workflow System Web services Interface Workflow System Web services Interface WFPN-PV system WFPN-PV system CAD/CAE Tools Design Resources Analysis Optimization Tools & Codes Tools & Codes CAD/CAE Tools Design Resources Analysis Optimization Tools & Codes Tools & Codes Fig 2. The workflow enabled and P2P based distributed collaboration environment 449

4 At the base of our previous studies, a workflow enabled and P2P based distributed collaboration environment is developed in this section, which is described in figure 2. The distributed collaboration environment is placed on the top of the JXTA platform and the connectivity of all peers is achieved through the JXTA network interfaces. In the distributed collaboration environment, the core enterprise in VE is as the super peer, and other cooperative enterprises in VE are as the participant peers. (1) In the super peer, there is a CPD platform, which consists of a VE management module, a workflow system, and a collaborative reviewing tool called CollabVue. The detailed descriptions of three modules are as follows. The VE management module takes charge of constructing the VE for a CPD project, which consists of VE Index and UDDI sub-modules. The workflow system consists of two sub-systems: one is the Timed Colored Petri Nets (TCPN) and Process-View (PV) based WMS called WFPN-PV system, and the other is an open source Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) engine, i.e. ActiveVOS designer system. The WFPN-PV system is designed as the internal WMS of super peer, and the ActiveVOS designer system is used to take charge of defining and executing the collaborative workflow of CPD. The ActiveVOS designer system is connected to the JXTA network interfaces by the JXTA/SOAP adapter. The CollabVue is a developed collaborative reviewing tool to assist the engineers located in different places to review the design schemes collaboratively. (2) In the participant peer, the WFPN-PV system is also designed as the internal WMS, and a Web services interface is developed to connect the WFPN-PV system with the JXTA/SOAP adapter, to jointly realize the connection of WFPN-PV system with the JXTA network interfaces. In the distributed collaboration environment, the collaborative execution of CPD workflow is realize by the synchronous running of these workflow systems in cooperative enterprises of the VE, where the ActiveVOS designer system takes charge of the synchronously running of WFPN-PV systems in super peer and participant peers. Fig 3. The collaborative workflow of the SWATH development 4. Case study The SWATH mainly consists of three parts, i.e. the upper water hulls, two middle dual struts, and two dual underwater hulls. The development of the SWATH needs joint contribution of the cross-organizational and multidisciplinary engineers. The workflow of the SWATH development is described in Figure 3, which includes the activities of requirements analysis, initial design, initial scheme reviewing, multidisciplinary optimization, final scheme reviewing and detailed design. The activity of 450

5 Fig 4. The distributed collaborative development scene of the SWATH multidisciplinary optimization can be further decomposed into a sub-workflow which consists of the activities of system analysis, structural optimization, fluid optimization, system optimization and obtain optimized scheme, described in figure 3.a. Similarly, the activities of structural optimization and fluid optimization can be further decomposed into sub-workflows, and described in figure 3.b and figure 3.c separately. In the case of SWATH development, the activities of structural optimization and fluid optimization are finished by two cooperative enterprises individually, and the rest of activities in the workflow of SWATH development are finished in the core enterprise of VE. Figure 4 describes the actual operation of the built distributed collaboration environment, where a core enterprise and two selected cooperative enterprises form the VE for the development of SWATH. At the early stage of the CPD project, the workflow models are designed in WFPN-PV system and ActiveVOS designer system of the core enterprise and WFPN-PV systems of the two cooperative enterprises. At the execution stage of the CPD project, the CollabVue system are adopted to support the collaborative reviewing of initial and finial deisgn scheme of SWATH, where related engineers located in different departments of the core enterprise jointly finish the activities. With the collaborative running of WFPN-PV systems and ActiveVOS designer system, the engineers located in the three enterprises of VE are jointly finish the multidisciplinary optimization activity, adopting the geographical distributed design tools, such as ISIGHT, ANSYS and FLUENT. All activities in the workflow of SWATH development can be soomthly finished in the collaboration envrionment. 451

6 5. Conclusion The development of complicated products needs the collaboration among multidisciplinary engineers from different enterprises. To improve the efficiency of distributed collaboration, a workflow enabled and P2P based distributed collaboration environment is built, which provides a scalable platform for enterprises collaboration. In the distributed collaboration environment, the WMSs in cooperative enterprise can run synchronously to realize the collaborative execution of CPD cross-organizational workflow. At last, the collaborative development of SWATH is chosen as the case study to show the actual operation of the built collaboration environment. In the future, more collaborative product development cases in industry will be studied in the built collaboration environment. Acknowledgments This research has been supported by the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China under grant No.2009AA044601, the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under grant No , and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under grant No. NCET The authors also would like to thank the anonymous referees for their valuable comments. References [1] W. Li, Z. Qiu. State-of-the-Art technologies and methodologies for collaborative product development systems. International Journal of Production Research, 2006, 44(13): [2] E. Stohr, J. Zhao, Workflow automation: overview and research issues. Information Systems Frontiers, 2001, 3(3): [3] M. Blake, H. Gomaa, Agent-oriented compositional approaches to services-based cross-organizational workflow. Decision Support Systems, 2005, 40: [4] J. Jung, H. Kim, S. Kang, Standards-based approaches to B2B workflow integration. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 2006, 51: [5] Y. Luh. An innovative framework of collaborative-based workflow in development chain management. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 2011, 60: [6] K. Alexopoulos, S. Makris, V. Xanthakis, G. Chryssolouris. A web-services oriented workflow management system for integrated digital production engineering. CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology, 2011, online. [7] D. Liu, M. Shen, Workflow modeling for virtual processes: an order-preserving process-view approach. Information Systems, 2003, 28: [8] D. Liu, M. Shen, Business-to-business workflow interoperation based on process-views. Decision Support Systems, 2004, 38: [9] R. Eshuis, P. Grefen, Constructing customized process views. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2008, 64: [10] P. Grefen, N. Mehandjiev, G. Kouvas, G. Weichhart, R. Eshuis, Dynamic business network process management in instant virtual enterprises. Computers in Industry, 2009, 60: [11] L. Xu, H. Liu, S. Wang, K. Wang, Modeling and analysis techniques for cross-organizational workflow systems. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 2009, 26: [12] P. Jiang, X. Shao, H. Qiu, P. Li, Interoperability of cross-organizational workflows based on process-view for collaborative product development. Concurrent Engineering: Research and Application, 2008, 16: [13] P. Jiang, X. Shao, H. Qiu, L. Gao, P. Li, A Web services and process-view combined approach for process management of collaborative product development. Computers in Industry, 2009, 60: [14] P. Jiang, X. Shao, L. Gao, H. Qiu, P. Li, A process-view approach for cross-organizational workflows management. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 2010, 24: [15] P. Jiang, Y. Ding, L. Gao, X. Shao, Y. Shen. A distributed workflow management system for collaborative product development. Proceedings of IEEE The 17th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IE&EM2010), 2010, pp [16] G. Fakas, B. Karakostas, A peer to peer (P2P) architecture for dynamic workflow management. Information and Software Technology, 2004, 46: [17] L. Fan, A. Senthil Kumar, B. Jagdish, S. Bok, Development of a distributed collaborative design framework within peer-to-peer environment. Computer-Aided Design, 2008, 40: