• IE interfaces
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.221-233
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• 2005

e-Manufacturing can be referred to as a system methodology enabling the integration of manufacturing operations and IT technologies to achieve objectives of an enterprise. It is recently regarded as a powerful solution to survive in a chaotic marketplace. While conducting an e-Manufacturing project, we first needed to capture collaborative processes conducted by multiple participants in order to define functions of a system supporting them. However, pervasive process modeling techniques including IDEF3, Petri nets, and UML are not sufficient for modeling collaborative processes. Therefore, we first briefly investigate several process modeling methods including aforementioned modeling methods and ARIS focusing on the collaboration point of view. Then, we propose a new modeling method referred to as Collaborative Process Modeling (CPM) to clearly describe collaborative processes. Also, we develop and illustrate a rule for transforming collaborative process models into Marked Graph models to use the analysis power of the Petri nets. Using CPM empowers us to develop collaborative process models with simple notations, understand and facilitate the realization of the collaboration, and verify models before rushing into the development.