A workflow enabled distributed collaboration environment for development of complicated products

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.