Cooperative and integrated workflow and document management for engineering applications

Engineering workflow management has to cope with a great variety of processes. Well structured and a priori defined activities are mixed with creative, less structured, and continuously evolving process steps. The classical coordination support provided by workflow management systems has to be enhanced to cope with dynamic, product centered, and cooperative processes. We concentrate on cooperation support within workflow management on both document level and workflow level. First, we propose an integrated and flexible approach to process and document management which is based on an object oriented modeling framework. We outline how different kinds of processes can be supported on this basis. Finally, we introduce an approach for flexible control and data flow modeling which supports cooperation on the workflow level and takes versioning and different forms of data interchange between activities into account.