Application Development Method Supporting Enterprise Business Process Improvement

With the entensive application of computer technology, network technology and electronic business, speediness, agility, automatization and globality have become the new characteristics There are more changes and uncertainty in enterprises. To survive and gain dominance in the competition, enterprises must deal with their problem in a global and value-flow manner, allow the business continuous improvement, and construct the business process in a continuously adapted struct. The continuous improvement of enterprise business process requires that the applications change expediently and fleetly according to the improvement of the process. In conventional application development methods, there is a gap between the physical view and the logical view of the enterprise. The gap can lead to that application systems are unsuited with business process, and affect the speed of developing the application. Thus the application development methods can't match the continuous improvement of the business process. In the paper, a new application development method is presented that supports the continuous improvement of business process in an enterprise. The thesis also focuses on the following aspects:Based on the new development method, the enterprise modeling methods are studied and the integrated modeling architecture (InME) is presented. In InME, the domain view of an enterprise is modeled using ontology idea, and then the business process is described from different aspects, such as activity, process, resource, organization and data. The mapping relationships between business models and application models are also discussed after that.The development method can't work without the support of the software environment (InSE). The environment architecture of InSE is presented and key technologies are analysed. InSE bases on ORB to support distributed application development InME modeling method and application match. Based on the InSE andthe development method, a prototype system was developed, called InMC, which is an integrated platform for management and control in process enterprises.Business process is the key part of business models. The method how to use ATN to model the business process is presented. ATN can support all the primitives needed to model a workflow process and can model all the routing constructs present in today's workflow management systems can be modeled. ATN uses a recursive sub-network to describe detailed information of a process, and with the parameters ATN has explicit semantics besides the graphical nature.The method using Petri Net theory to analyse business models and application models is presented. So is the system structure. Similar to other formal theoretical modeling techniques, Petri Net theory faces challenges of modeling large scale complex systems. One of the theoretical solutions to such critical problems is to study formally the compositive operations of Petri Net. In this paper, four compositive operations of Petri Net are presented. The consistent relationship of the nets' behaviours for these operations is presented too.