Research On The Key Technologies To Collaborative Development Support Environment For Complicated Product

Collaborative product development is a modern development model that can provide cooperation across time, organizations and disciplines in multiple engineering teams. It can promote the competitive capacities of manufacturing enterprises greatly. Collaborative product development has new requirements on traditional coordination approach to product development process and collaborative design tools, which should provide the participants of product development with a collaborative working environment based on the automatic scheduling and coordinating the distributed product development activities.Exampled on the design and manufacturing process of the key components of aero-engines, this thesis studies the key technologies to collaborative development support environment for complicated products systematically. Based and focused on flexible workflow management technologies, this thesis realizes a unified task-coordinating platform that supports integration with the synchronized collaborative tools and fine-grained product data sharing in distributed network environment.In this thesis, the characteristics of collaborative product development are analyzed, and from the viewpoint of four kinds of cooperation patterns, i.e. organization and resource cooperation, process cooperation, information cooperation, and application cooperation, the requirements on computer support tools for the collaborative product development are discussed. Emphasized on integration of the four cooperation patterns, a reference model of collaborative product development support environment is put forward.The reference model is divided into three tiers, i.e. the description tier of subjects of product development, the flexible workflow management tier, and the federal product information management tier. In these tiers, several key technologies are studied in detail.(1) Organization and resource model of collaborative product development team. Based on Object-Oriented (O-O) technology, an organization and resource model with network structure is constructed and the problems of permanent object storage, graphical user interface, and data consistence in the organization/resource manager are discussed in detail.(2) Flexible workflow modeling technologies. The requirements on workflow model for collaborative product development are proposed through a practical case and workflow meta-model that is essentially composed of task-logic objects and process-logic objects is designed. In order to fill the requirements of synchronized collaborative work and hierarchical task decomposition, two special task types, i.e. collaborative task and dynamically refinable sub-process, are put forward. Theinternal structures of various tasks are also studied and exception handling and recovery strategies are discussed. Based on the proposed workflow meta-model, a graphical process definition language is designed and the flexible features of workflow graph are discussed. Moreover, the data flow is modeled by variable influence table that describes the data communication between tasks and can simulate the data flow and material flow in the collaborative product development.(3) Architecture of flexible workflow executing system and control mechanisms of distributed workflow execution. A new dynamic process model partition and distribution method is proposed in this thesis, which can delete the redundant information form distributed executing sites gradually during the process execution, and still support dynamic change of the workflow processes. The process partition algorithm is studied in detail, and the architecture of a fully distributed workflow executing system is put forward based on this algorithm. Other problems, such as flexible distribution of tasks, dynamic refining of process model, control mechanisms based on EGA rules, and the integration of workflow system with other applications, especially the synchronized collaborative tools, are fully discussed.(4) Verification of process model and dynamic change of workflow. The dynamic...