Design of a workflow management system for manufacturing grid

As a result of rapid development of network technologies, the resource sharing based collaborative business is becoming an important trend for the development of enterprises. A distributed resource based collaborative workflow management system (CWMS) was proposed in the paper, which will greatly ensure the efficient of cooperation among partner enterprises. In the paper, enterprises and their partners construct a manufacturing grid framework, all the resources geographically distributed in different enterprise are all looked as "grid nodes". In order to perform a business, some of the resource nodes will be involved and work collaboratively according to the business model. Therefore, series of cooperation relationship will be built within the grid framework, which are called "grid edges". What the workflow management system does is to organize related resource node, and construct the correct grid edges, and ensure the correct operation order, information or data or resources can be transferred to the correct distributed nodes at the correct time. In the paper, the characteristics, architecture, key technologies of the workflow management system (CWMS) was addressed.