Constraint driven workflow execution for concurrent product development

One of the major goals of Concurrent Product Development (CPD) is to shorten the design cycle by increasing more execution overlaps of the design tasks. Aiming at this goal, this paper focuses on the question “When does the task require the information from its upstream tasks and when will the required information be available?” The information constraint driven execution semantics is proposed to handle this question. This constrain driven semantics loose the time strictness of the information constraints that imposed on the design tasks, which enable the task can be started earlier as soon as the required information is available rather than after the upstream tasks are completely finished. By following this execution semantics, some concurrencies of the design tasks execution are attained. Through rewriting the ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules based workflow model from task completion event driven to information constraint satisfaction driven, the workflow management system can support this execution semantics.