A Service-Oriented Architecture for Interdisciplinary Product Design Workflow Choreography

Inter-disciplinary collaboration is critical to the success of processes employed in the development of complex products. A Workflow Management System (WMS) formalizes and automates product development process activities at various stages in the product lifecycle. Existing bridges between a WMS and the application systems involved in product development processes focus on intradisciplinary activities and static binding of artifacts to such activities. In this paper, we describe a novel SOA-based approach to bridge the gap between WMS and loosely-integrated domain-specific application systems focused on interdisciplinary process activities and dynamic binding of artifacts to activities. Our approach builds upon service-oriented inter-disciplinary collaboration architecture. Our solution consists of two components: System Data Management (SDM) and a template for integration between a WMS and the SDM. We illustrate our approach using an automotive use case for requirements verification.