A Management System Supporting Interorganizational Cooperative Development Processes in Chemical Engineering

Development processes in chemical engineering are hard to support. In particular, interorganizational development processes are concerned with the coordination of activities carried out by engineering teams distributed across several cooperating organizations. The management system AHEAD is based on long-term experience gathered in multiple application domains (software, mechanical, or chemical engineering). AHEAD supports the management of dynamic interorganizational development processes by dynamic process views which allow to manage the partial visibility of processes for external organizations. AHEAD provides support for evolving process views which are able to reflect the changes in evolving development processes. Process views serve as the basis for inter-process connection. Processes can be split top-down into subprocesses for different organizations or composed bottom-up of pre-existing processes from different organizations. Mixing top-down and bottom-up process planning and execution is possible. AHEAD allows process managers to monitor and control their intraorganizational development processes with all interorganizational connections to processes in cooperating organizations in a uniform modeling language.