Design of workflow-based integrated quality management system

To address the problem of lacking process management in a function-orientedquality management system, an integrated quality management system was designed by taking advantage of process management, control, and reconfiguration supported in the workflow technology. The principal contribution is to present a framework of workflow-based integrated quality management system, which supports process management and control for aircraft manufacturing. A three-tier system architecture based on J2EE (java 2 enterprise edition) was investigated. In particular, a workflow-enabled platform was developed by integrating a workflow middleware into the framework. The platform supports workflow modeling, execution and management, and provides necessary tools for quality management. The quality information management and process management were well combined in the system. Finally, an integration method based on XML(extensible markup language)was introduced aimed at enhancing the integration of the quality system with other management information systems. This design has been put into practice in the quality management system of a large-scale aircraft manufacture enterprise.