The Affairs Of The Workflow Management System Modeling

Rapidly developing and maturing information technologies such as the Internet have changed the business environment, leading to business operating more quickly, with more close-knit and complex value chains. This in turn, has led to some new trends in software technologies such as heterogeneous, transactional and distributed technologies. The transactional workflow management system is a platform and tool to implement Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). It not only integrates different business workflow and application functions into a system that can be run automatically and managed effectively through the platform, but also assures every computing application is integrated correctly by means of a workflow transaction. The system meets new requirements of modern enterprise in transaction modeling of workflow management systems.In this article, an optimistic nested transaction model is presented based on a database transaction model that is data-oriented and a workflow transaction model that is process-oriented. The system can solve problems such as correctness and reliability in long time transactions and collaborative transactions by sorting workflow activities to improve efficiency. The optimistic model is composed of a well-formed nested transaction, workflow model with a concurrent control protocol. It defines full semantic transaction primitives and presents a formal transaction schedule, which has been proven to be serializable, cascadeless and non-deadlocking. The optimistic nested transaction model overcomes the shortcomings of the Advance Transaction Model (ATM) that is based on compensating or agency, using the assumption that all compensating transactions can always be committed successfully. The model is a new way to research workflow transaction management.In this article, primitives with semantic of optimistic nested transaction model are compared with ones in workflow model. A mapping between two models is presented also, and three transform methods are introduced: forward order, backward order and hybrid order. We can transform a workflow definition into a transactional workflow definition by one of them, and keep primitives of transactional workflow model consistent with ones of optimistic nested transaction model, and the transportation of workflow activities is consistent with creating of children nested transaction. In this article, a software architecture based on aspect-oriented software development is presentedto implement transactional workflow management system. It is a new ideal to develop transactional workflow management system or transactional workflow application system. In this article, an implementation of transactional workflow management system, named SynchroFLOW-T, is introduced according to above theory. Its software architecture is based on aspect-oriented software development; all requirements of workflow are identified into four concerns: process, transaction, activity and participant. We can implement each concern independently, and then we can weave these implementations of concerns into a workflow application. It has some advantages, such as simplicity, feasibility, and a higher level of reusability, maintenance and evolution.