Key techniques about the process integration for product design

The prevailing techniques or methods based on various engineering tools have been achieved many wonderful results. But in distributed environment, how these engineering tools effectively communicate and cooperate with each other inevitably becomes a very important factor in product development. So it is necessary to research the key techniques of process integration and application integration. Based on the analysis of the product development process, we divide the process into three levels according to different grains from macroscopy to microcosm. The three levels which can be called project management, workflow management and the design process level are analyzed in detail. In this paper, our research focuses on the fine-grained design process. We established a four-tier architecture which consists of representation layer, process control layer, services layer and repository layer for process integration. We use web services to realize the dynamic data integration between applications. Process model (PM) is presented to describe elements in process. Data context model which represents various data in process and behavior model which controls the transformations of product data are explained in detail. The key techniques are developed as a prototype to prove the concept.