Flexible Artifact-Driven Automation of Product Design Processes

Automated support of business processes by information systems can be seen as state-of-the-art for many domains, such as production planning or customer relationship management. A myriad of approaches to the automation of business processes in these domains has been proposed. However, these approaches are not suited for highly creative processes, as they are observed in the field of innovative product design. These processes require a high degree of flexibility of the process implementation. In this paper, we focus on product design processes and propose a methodology for the implementation of supporting workflows. In order to cope with the imposed flexibility requirements, we follow an artifact-centric approach. Based on high-level process models, object life-cycle models are derived. Those are manually enriched and used for automatic generation of an executable workflow model. We also present an implementation of our approach.