Developing an agent‐based workflow management system for collaborative product design
| Pages | 680-699 |
| Date | 01 June 2006 |
| Published date | 01 June 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/02635570610666449 |
| Author | Ching‐Jen Huang,Amy J.C. Trappey,Yin‐Ho Yao |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
Developing an agent-based
workflow management system for
collaborative product design
Ching-Jen Huang
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chinyi
Institute of Technology, Taiping, Taiwan, Republic of China
Amy J.C. Trappey
Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, National
Tsing Hwa University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China, and
Yin-Ho Yao
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ta Hwa Institute of
Technology, Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this research is to develop a prototype of agent-based intelligent workflow
system for product design collaboration in a distributed network environment.
Design/methodology/approach – This research separates the collaborative workflow enactment
mechanisms from the collaborative workflow building tools for flexible workflow management.
Applying the XML/RDF (resource description framework) ontology schema, workflow logic is
described in a standard representation. Lastly, a case study in collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design
is depicted to demonstrate the agent-based workflow system for the design collaboration on the web.
Findings – Agent technology can overcome the difficulty of interoperability in cross-platform,
distributed environment with standard RDF data schema. Control and update of workflow functions
become flexible and versatile by simply modifying agent reasoning and behaviors.
Research limitations/implications – When business partners want to collaborate, how to
integrate agents in different workflows becomes a critical issues.
Practical implications – Agent technology can facilitate design cooperation and teamwork
communication in a collaborative, transparent product development environment.
Originality/value – This research establishes gene ralized flow logic RDF models and an
agent-based intelligent workflow management system, called AWfMS, based on the RDF schema of
workflow definition. AWfMS minimizes barriers in the distributed design process and hence increases
design cooperations among partners.
Keywords Work flow, Intelligent agents, Productdesign, Product design systems
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
With the development of internet technology, competitive pressures are forcing
companies to consider strategies to reduce costs and compress time between each stage
of the value chain (Humphreys et al., 2005). The concept of product design
collaboration over the internet has been widely adopted to reduce time-to-market,
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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This research is partially supported by the National Science Council and ITRI research grants,
which are greatly appreciated by the authors. The authors also wish to thank W-J. Tzeng’s
technical supports in applying JADE for AWfMS implementation.
IMDS
106,5
680
Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 106 No. 5, 2006
pp. 680-699
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/02635570610666449
project’s life cycle and to take requirement into consideration for competitive
advantages (Bouchlaghem et al., 2004). Integration and collaboration are a common
term in the enterprise systems (Gulledge, 2006). In collaborative product design, each
team member must be responsible for one or more works and contribute what they can
in different domains of expertise at various stages to overcome the major weakness of
traditional face-to-face communication collaboration (Cheng et al., 2006). From the
perspective of supporting collaborative activities, research on the collaborative design
can be divided into two main purposes, i.e. to assist users solve complex problems
intelligently and to mediate cooperative activities intelligently. These researches are
categorized into the domain of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), where
workflow systems play a critical role (Aknine, 1998). These workflow systems
constitute the coordinate mechanisms for a collaborative design environment with the
benefits of flexible process definition, easy tracking of activities, and effective process
management.
Recently, the term “agent” has been widely used to build computer support for
works with collaborative design nature (Trappey et al., 2004). The integration of
workflow management with agent technology has attracted attention of researchers
in the related area. Researchers apply agent technology in the workflow system to
achieve the benefits of autonomy, social ability, pro-activeness, and reactivity (Xia and
Li, 1999; Kuo, 2004). Further, using software agent technology to provide flexible and
autonomous solutions for workflow management is proposed by Yan et al. (2001) for
business process coordination. However, current workflow management technologies
have difficulties in solving the challenges of collaborative product design in a
distributed environment with dynamic nature of product development, distributed
knowledge and resources, and risks attached to design collaboration (Xu and Wan g,
2002). The risks of collaboration occur significantly when an organization losses direct
control over the product development process, incomplete information is disclosed
with lack of transparency (Parker, 2000). To solve the problems, one of the major issues
is to deal with the interoperability and communication between agents and
agent-based platforms. The cooperation and coordination among agents becomes the
most important issue in agent systems research (Xia and Li, 1999).
In this research, we propose an agent-based workflow management system (AWfMS)
with RDF (resource description framework) ontology schema for collaborative design
flow definition. To enhance cooperation and coordination among agents, we constructed
our work with two main focuses. First, we define a generic workflow metadata model (i.e.
data schema) for the development of collaboration functionalities and for the
interoperability between agents platforms. This led us to design a standardized flow
logic by using XML/RDF ontology schema. On the other hand, we define agent-based
workflow architecture using the workflow data schema to perform the desired functions.
The purposes of this research is to establish an agent-based intelligent workflow system,
which applies the RDF ontology schema as a common representation of workflow logics
and elements to enable design chains cooperation, design knowledge reuse and
coordination in real time. Further, a case study in collaborative system-on-chip (SoC)
design is presented to demonstrate how the AWfMS works in the domain of integrated
circuit (IC) design to bring benefits to IC corporations and project managers.
The remainder of this paper is organized as followings. Section 2 reviews the
background and previous literature. Section 3 defines the agent-based workflow
A workflow
management
system
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