Flexible workflows for an energy-oriented product development process

Abstract

Product development processes are flexible and dynamic in nature. In this domain, workflows are commonly used for representing business processes in change management or for document management. The product development process itself can hardly be represented by a business process that is defined in a design phase and fixed during runtime. However, the workflow technique can be extended by concepts for flexible workflows. Many workflow management systems now provide solutions for flexible process changes. In this article, hierarchical workflows and dynamically selectable sub-workflows are introduced to enable a flexible workflow execution on a standard workflow management system. As proof of concept flexible workflows are applied to an energy-oriented product development process.