Research on cross-enterprise workflow and change in VPDM

The change of workflow is one of the key issues often needs addressed in enterprise business process, especially the cooperation in cross-enterprises. In order to improve the collaborative design among enterprises involved in mechatronics engineering, this paper proposes a technical framework for cross-enterprise workflows, on the basis of Virtual Product Data Management (VPDM). Starting from the directed graph, the systemic model of VPDM based in cross-enterprise workflows is built, and its realization mechanism is described in detail. Then the processing method and the procedure about the change of VPDM based workflows are both given elaborate discussion. After that, a judgment algorithm on ignorable activities is introduced. This paper ends with the explanation of this method. A successful example verifies its feasibility on solving the problem of the change of cross-enterprise workflows.