A Web services and process-view combined approach for process management of collaborative product development

Collaborative Product Development (CPD) across enterprises has been recognized as an effective strategy to connect multi-enterprise wide project teams to develop more competitive products. Process management is vital to the successful implementation of CPD in a multi-enterprise environment. In this paper, a novel Web Services (WSs) and process-view combined approach has been developed to manage the dynamic and distributed process of CPD to enhance the workflow interoperability among heterogeneous Workflow Management Systems (WMSs) of enterprises. Meanwhile, a hybrid P2P based WMSs framework has been built to provide an open and scalable architecture to deploy inter-enterprises collaboration. A software prototype system has been implemented using the open JXTA platform, and the collaborative development of a motorcycle has been used as a test case to validate the proposed approach and the prototype system.