STANDARDS COMPLIANT PLATFORM FOR PRODUCT DESIGN IN DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS

^The literature on product-based workflow design considers only static collaborative environments where the product model is static and does not change. However the possible evolution of the product model and thus its impact on the collaborative environment are not considered despite the importance of this evolution for innovative product design. As a result the uncontrolled changes can easily break the cross-organizational process that links the different stakeholders in the collaborative environment. In this paper we present a framework that builds the collaboration contract from the product model and supports a controlled evolution of this contract. We leverage this framework by a set of management operations (services) that enable the contract evolution and investigate how a tailoring operation will not impact the executable cross-organizational process unless this process is maintained executable by the workflow engine. These operations are provided as services by a collaborative platform. Nevertheless, software applications that are provided through services following the Software as a service (SaaS) paradigm generally need to be compliant to some standards. In order to implement our management operations, we need to select the software application that provides the most conformant service interface to a given standard. Accordingly, we develop a formal framework that tests the compliance and reports quantitative results that help experts take the right decision. Unlike existing work that focuses on a single dimension when checking the compliance of a software application with the corresponding standard (for example the functional dimension exclusively, or the syntactic dimension exclusively), in this work we consider multiple dimensions at the same time. This provides more comprehensive results