The Design And Implementation Of An Agent-based Distributed Workflow Management System

With the development of enterprise informatization, businesses in an enterprise are becoming more and more complicated. One of the approaches to the informatization is to make full use of workflow technology. The existed workflow management systems have the disadvantages, such as, limited integration ability, insufficient flexibility, poor inter-operations and the capabilties that satisfy the complicated distributed application in an enterprise. Therefore, researches on distributed workflow management systems are needed to be sensible for enterprise informatization.The core work in this paper is to design and implement an agent-based distributed workflow management system (short for AWFMS). The agent technology can make the system more adaptive and scalable. To ensure the inter-workflow and co-workflow communication, the design of the model was based on the standard workflow model and all the agents in AFWMS will follow the FIPA standard, moreover, the model was implemented on the JADE (Java Agent Development Environment).The researches in this paper include: (1) the research of Agent-based distributed workflow management framework. The framework consists of two parts: workflow node agent's coordination model and workflow node agent's inernal business process model. The agents in the framework can adapt to dynamic environment and deal with the complicated business as well as reduce the cost of business disposal through the coordination of agents; (2) the research on the implementation of the workflow node Agent's coordination model. The service publish/discovery mechanism is based on agent technology to detect the environment movement. The complicated business processes were managed by agents'coordination;(3)The research on implementation of the workflow node agent's internal business process model. The implementation of the model is based on the JADE platform and includes the HSM (Hierarchical State Machine) based workflow engine implementation, business process Agent's inter-Agent implementation, management and monitoring of the workflow process by the agents'cooperations; (4) an Agent-based online distributed ticket booking system which is implemented on the model of AWFMS. The system will provide clients the ticket booking service and make more sensible options for clients.The contributions in this paper include the service publish/discovery mechanism which is based on domain and automonous agent, and the method of HSM-based workflow engine implementation.The researches in this paper may do help to the development of the distributed workflow technology.