Management of complex data objects in ship designing process

Management of ship designing is difficult because of the complexity in modeling of the process and large amounts of data throughout the process. Though existing technologies of BPMN can solve the first problem, BPMN does not provide sufficient supports on dealing with complex dependencies in the process, e.g., storage and search problems of correlated data with “many to many” relations. In this paper, we introduce a series of annotations of data objects to solve this problem. First, we extend the annotations of data objects based on BPMN and utilize foreign key in relational database to manage the relations between data objects. Second, we use SQL queries to execute the common operations to data objects in the process. Our approach is the extension of mature BPMN and database technologies, so it is standard and reusable. We implemented our approach on the Produce Management System to verify the availability and efficiency.