Development of a Multi-Layered Workflow Management System for Product Development Processes

제품 개발 프로세스 관리를 위한 다층 통합 워크플로우 시스템 개발

In this paper, we propose a multi-layered architecture of workflow management systems based on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). The system aims to support product development processes in distributed environment. Many companies have started to adopt workflow management systems to manage and support their business processes. However, there are many problems in direct application of those systems to product development environments. These mainly resulted from the dynamic features of product development processes. It is strongly required to support dynamic processes as well as static and procedural ones in an integrated and consistent manner. To meet these requirements, a basic workflow management system has been developed as the core component of the integrated architecture. This performs the basic functions of workflow management system. Second, a dynamic workflow management system based on a bidding mechanism has been developed to manage processes that cannot be easily defined or are likely to be modified, Finally, an SGML workflow management system, which is the third layer in the architecture, has been developed to manage documents processing workflows by integration SGML documents contents and process information into the structured SGML document.