Modeling workflow activities for collaborative process planning with product lifecycle management tools

Process planning activities are critical in manu-facturing distributed environments where different companies need to collaborate in product development. In this work, we propose a workflow model for a collaborative process planning environment in which original equipment manufacturer and suppliers companies interact with the help of Product Lifecycle Management and CAD/CAM tools. The proposed workflow model establishes the different activities, the information flows and the different stages that must be followed by all the participants. A pilot implementation has been made in order to validate the model in a realistic industrial scenario.