Interoperative end-user process modelling for process collaborative manufacturing

Abstract

As business environments change rapidly, the ability to quickly set up a collaborative automated business processes is desirable. Collaborative business processes are increasingly driven by business agility, adaptability and flexibility, particularly in a modern manufacturing enterprise environment. Traditionally, collaborative business processes are used among big organisations. Many of collaborative business process systems are designed for a long-term use with central control. It is a great challenge for enterprises to adapt processes to the today's business pace. Today's enterprise users demand many situational collaborative business process applications which handle business needs within a short period and which normally do not need to support too many users. The traditional centrally controlled systems are not designed for such situational applications. In this paper, we explore how business process mashups can be used for manufacturing enterprise collaboration. We highlight the modelling of end-users process collaboration from both a control flow and a data flow perspective. Based on our analyses, an end-user process modelling approach is proposed for process enterprise mashup applications. Our approach, illustrated by reference to an example pharmaceutical collaborative manufacturing case, will support collaboration among users with different levels of modelling skills and expertise in a pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise environment.

Keywords:

• collaborative manufacturing
• process modelling
• end-user process modelling
• process collaboration, process-oriented mashups

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the EU SOA4All and FAST projects. Part of the work by Dr. Lai Xu and Dr. Paul de Vrieze was performed at the SAP Research, Switzerland.