The following technical report is available from
http://aib.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:
Controlling Development Processes
Thomas Heer
AIB 2012-02
The development of an innovative product is a complex and highly dynamic
process which has to be
performed in a controlled way. Several dependencies exist between the
defined tasks, the assigned
resources, and the artifacts to be produced. In a development project,
which is planned and executed
according to a process definition, the time, budget, and available
resources are limited. Controlling
a development process involves monitoring the actual performance and
analyzing whether it conforms to
the plan. Poor performance, changing requirements, the detection of
errors, and the creation or
modification of key artifacts may require plan changes at process
runtime. As a consequence of the
inherent complexity of the task, software tool support is essential for
controlling development
processes.
Different insufficient solutions are nowadays applied in practice for
this purpose. Project
management systems support project planning and to some degree project
controlling, but they do not
support the execution of predefined processes. Workflow management
systems on the other hand are
commonly applied for process execution. However, they do not support the
scheduling of tasks in a
project, and they are not flexible enough for the management of
development processes. As a
consequence, both types of systems are insufficient when it comes to
controlling development
processes. Attempts for their integration fell short with respect to
representing execution states
in project plans and scheduling workflow instances.
This thesis describes a new concept for a process management system,
which combines the strengths of
the aforementioned tools and eliminates their deficiencies by
substantial extensions. Starting
point of the research were results of the collaborative research center
(SFB) 476 IMPROVE. An
integrated approach for the management of development processes has been
extended with respect to
task scheduling, progress measurement, and change management in
development projects. In
particular, an algorithm for the automatic generation of a project
schedule has been developed
which takes the execution states of the tasks into account. Subprocesses
of a development process
can be executed by a workflow engine, which interprets predefined
workflow definitions. With
respect to monitoring, specific progress measures for the degree of
completion of tasks have been
defined which rely on elements of the process model. In the case of plan
changes at process
runtime, the consistency of the plan with the execution state of the
process is ensured.
The concepts have been implemented in the extension module PROCEED of
the commercial life cycle
asset information management system Comos of Siemens Industry Software.
Comos is widely used in
the plant engineering industries. Therefore, this thesis combines
fundamental research results
with a proof of concept implementation in an industrial context. The
realization of PROCEED based
on an industrial platform offers great opportunities for further
evaluation of the provided
functionalities in plant design projects in the plant engineering
industries.
