Abstract
Since the complexity of products and their design processes has increased, products are now designed collaboratively by many companies around the world. Thus, it is very important that new product development is properly managed using formal project management (PM) tools electronically. While traditional PM focuses on scheduling and planning of projects, current PM focuses on managing the processes because the project length and result are directly affected by its process. The concept of using workflow management in PM is to regard a project as a series of processes and makes this process flow automatically. The objective of this research is to establish a workflow management system to manage project flow, especially when process logics embed with rules that may drive the flow. The focus is on using an expert system’s inference engine which infers according to ‘facts’ and ‘rules’ for directions of the processes. In our research, we use ‘facts’ to represent the projects, tasks, resources, etc, while ‘rules’ to define relations of tasks in a project flow. The fact of each task contains not only the basic information but also the status and result of the task. The rules that control the start of each task can be fulfilled according to corresponding facts of previous tasks. Thus, rules are triggered by the inference engine and facts are modified subsequently so the process status can be changed accordingly. The direction of a project flow can be decided based on facts, which represent tasks, and pre-defined rules. Thus, the project output can be controlled precisely to meet customers’ requirements. The research contributes to manage some complex project processes imbedded logical rules for the looping of the processes.