Workflow modeling and verification in product data management

The issue of product data management (PDM) for business productivity has recently received attention in industrial production. Using a PDM system to support business process requires to solve two issues further: (1) definitions of product database, (2) workflow management based on product database. However, little research has been reported on how to model and verify workflow in product data management for business processes. This paper focuses on how to model and verify workflow in product data management by restricting the research´s scope to the second issue for deriving the PDM object definitions. In fact the proposed method offers a procedure and techniques for defining product data that serve as planning database design for business activities in manufacturing enterprises. For definitions, the key contribution is that the mapping is created between real world and digital world, so one should make it easy to map physical entities to PDM objects in this commercial PDM software by means of workflow modeling and its verification. Finally, the workflow model abstracted from business processes can be easily translated into any specific data object dictionary for object-oriented or relational product data management system.