Abstract
In order to survive the keen competition, enterprise should advance the quality of products and design the product that answer to the quick-changing market in the shortest time. It is the key in strengthening competitiveness by using resource effectively and responding demands quickly. There are many researches depicting that the significant benefits for enterprises using workflow management system and collaborative product design. Thus, this research proposes a workflow management system architecture, which enables the practice of collaborative product design. Within this architecture, we choose software agent technology to achieve the information transportation and process coordination among design partners in distributed environments. In this research, we separate the workflow enactment mechanism from the workflow building tool by using agent technology. The agent behaviors include communicating with users, communicating with other agents, and controlling the flows of tasks according to the attributes of users input. Further, we use XML/RDF schema to present a workflow template in a RDF file. It enhances the workflow data interchangeability. At last, this research implements a prototype system based on the system architecture. Applying the concept of collaborative product design makes development quickly with instant communication and versatile products. The workflow management system embedded with agent technology makes the system reusable, extensible, and flexible in changing flow logics.