A web-services oriented workflow management system for integrated digital production engineering

Digital production engineering is a complex procedure, since distributed engineering teams, using heterogeneous IT tools, should be able to collaborate in order to design and implement a production system. This work presents the concept and its implementation of a workflow system for collaborative computer-aided production engineering. The workflow system supports the execution of production engineering activities in the Extended Enterprise (EE) and is built on the basis of web services and the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). It also manages the electromechanical data exchange, using XML that conforms to the AutomationML format. An application of the tool, developed for an assembly engineering project in the automotive industry, is being presented.