ITcon Vol. 11, Special Issue Process Modelling, Process Management and Collaboration , pg. 489-507, http://www.itcon.org/2006/36

Awareness and workflow based coordination of networked co-operations in structural design

SUBMITTED: January 2006
REVISED: April 2006
PUBLISHED: July 2006
EDITOR: Katranuschkov P

Sascha Alda, Dipl.-Inf.
Research assistant of the Institute of Computer Science, University of Bonn, Germany
email: alda@cs.uni-bonn.de

Jochen Bilek, Dipl.-Ing.
Research assistant of the Institute of Computational Engineering, University of Bochum, Germany
email: bilek@inf.bi.rub.de

Armin B. Cremers, Prof. Dr.
Director of the Institute of Computer Science, University of Bonn, Germany
email: abc@cs.uni-bonn.de httpd: http://www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/III/

Dietrich Hartmann, Prof. Dr.-Ing.
Director of the Institute of Computational Engineering, University of Bochum, Germany
email: hartus@inf.bi.rub.de httpd: http://www.inf.bi.rub.de

SUMMARY: Modern engineering projects in the application domain of structural design are organized as networked co-operations due to permanently enlarged competition pressure and a high degree of complexity while performing concurrent design activities. One of the major challenges of these networked co-operations constitutes the coordination of the activities of all involved participants. Recent off-the-shelf software systems, however, fail for coordinating these complex activities in this area. In the course of our research activities, we have developed two different directions for coordinating such projects: (1) a workflow-based concept regulating the activities by a global workflow model (University of Bochum) and (2) an awareness model that allows to perceive activities of other partners and to derive new activities mentally (University of Bonn). This paper describes a novel integration approach of these two models: according to the global workflow model, users can be informed such that they are enabled to detect potential inconsistencies while modelling activities at an early stage.

KEYWORDS: peer-to-peer architectures, multi-agent systems, workflow, networked co-operations, structural design, Petri nets, awareness.

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CITATION:

Alda S, Bilek J, Cremers A B and Hartmann D (2006) Awareness and workflow based coordination of networked co-operations in structural design, ITcon Vol. 11, Special Issue Process Modelling, Process Management and Collaboration , pg. 489-507, http://www.itcon.org/2006/36