How to guarantee compliance between workflows and product lifecycles?

• A method is proposed to solve compliance between workflows and object-versioning lifecycles in product lifecycle management systems.
• The method is formally shown to be correct.
• The method is implemented as open source software.
• The approach has been validated in practice through the use of real-life models and interviews with domain experts.

Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems are widely used in the manufacturing industry. A core feature of such systems is to provide support for versioning of product data. As workflow functionality is increasingly used in PLM systems, the possibility emerges that the versioning transitions for product objects as encapsulated in process models do not comply with the valid version control policies mandated in the objects’ actual lifecycles. In this paper we propose a solution to tackle the (non-)compliance issues between processes and object version control policies. We formally define the notion of compliance between these two artifacts in product lifecycle management and then develop a compliance checking method which employs a well-established workflow analysis technique. This forms the basis of a tool which offers automated support to the proposed approach. By applying the approach to a collection of real-life specifications in a main PLM system, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our solution to the field.