Integrating workflow technology in a system to support Concurrent Engineering

The development of new engineering products is often a complex, expensive, time-consuming process and methods such as Concurrent Engineering have been developed to improve this situation. Previous research by the authors has resulted in advances in versioning to support Concurrent Engineering, which provides a controlled environment for change. Providing support for processes should further enhance the system and this paper discusses two main types of process model that are required: Change Process Models for managing the changes to a product and Development Process Models to represent the sequence of events needed to create a product. A set of Change Process Models for versioning have been designed using UML activity diagrams and implemented in a demonstration system using workflow technology.