Supporting engineering design process with compliance flow - an intelligent workflow management system

Flexibility is one of the most important requirements for a system that is to succeed in supporting engineering processes. On the other hand, such processes are typically embodied in recent standards and guideline for the sake of quality assurance. These standards normally provide a framework that deals in a systematic manner with all the activities necessary to achieve the required quality. While workflow management systems (WfMS) are widely used in providing support for well-defined and predictable 'administrative' processes, current workflow products lack the ability to handle complex, dynamic changing, collaborative engineering design processes and to ensure standard compliance. This paper presents the results of the Compliance Flow Project that extends the application scope of current workflow systems to deal with more complex and flexible engineering design process, particularly for safety engineering domain. Compliance Flow has two novel features: (1) employment of software agent to actively assist in quality assurance in both process build and run time, (2) provision of support for engineering design process through the integration of a number of innovative AI technologies,. The key requirements for the system are identified, and how these requirements are tackled is outlined.