Digital Thread-Based Business Process Collaboration in Digital Manufacturing Systems: Modeling and Data-Driven Mechanisms

Cross-organizational collaboration in digital manufacturing systems is often hindered by fragmented data handoff, inconsistent versions, and delayed downstream collaboration across lifecycle stages and heterogeneous systems. To address this issue, a digital thread (DT)-based business process collaboration paradigm is proposed, and its corresponding modeling and execution method is developed in this paper. Firstly, a digital thread-based business collaboration architecture is constructed, in which the unified digital model (UDM) and the authoritative source of truth (ASoT) are integrated to support consistent referencing and authoritative state control of shared data objects. Subsequently, a business process collaboration model and a data-state-driven business collaboration mechanism are established by integrating data state visibility with dual resource constraints. Finally, the proposed method is formalized and evaluated through timed colored Petri net (TCPN) simulation using production business data from a civil aircraft manufacturing enterprise. The results indicate that, under identical resource constraints, the nominal makespan is reduced by approximately 11.3% as collaboration triggering is shifted from document-level handoff to data-state-driven collaboration, thereby improving process parallelism without increasing physical resource inputs.