Research On Workflow Management Technology

Workflow management technology is the core technology of achieving enterprise business process automatization. By modeling, analyzing and simulating of enterprise business process, we could standardize and optimize the enterprise business, remove irrational segment, accomplish enterprise business process reengineering and construct knowledge base and rule base which would guide the enterprise decision chronically and effectively. As the core technology of process management, workflow management could integrate with other application software systems (e.g. PDM or ERP), which make such systems have great flexibility, thereby the integrated systems could reengineer so as to satisfy the requirement of customers when the customers' requirements changed. Nowadays, workflow management has been widely used in Electronic Business, Electronic Government and Enterprise informatization. Many software companies are undertaking the research of workflow management technology, and developing some workflow management software. In the workflow application fields, many existing software tools integrate with the functions of workflow management, e.g., SAP's mySAP PLM, PTC's Wirdchill, and IBM's Smarteam etc. There have been several international standardization organization established workflow management and engineering standards. WfMC presents the reference model of workflow, workflow products architecture and interface, and submit to OMG; OMG and WfMC jointly present the proposition of transforming workflow into CORBA; BPMI presents BPML on process on process management; IBM, Microsoft, Bea and Sun Companies the workflow technology deeply, and bring forward a process description language-BPEL collaboratively. Some researchers study the workflow modeling, workflow coordination and workflow security successively. Workflow modeling, workflow security management, workflow instance evolution and coorditional workflow have become hot resurch fields. There are many experts to do some works,such as Aalst who works in the workflow modeling field, Bertino and Atluri who work in the workflow security and authorization management field, Casati and Ellis who work in workflow change and instance evolution field, Grasso and Aslst who work in the coorditional workflow field. At home, Tshinghua University, Huazhong Science and Technology University, Institute of Computing Technology Chinese Academy of Science, Institute of Software Technology Chinese Academy of Science, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Jilin University have make scientific researches on workflow technology.This paper surveys the existing work and application background of workflow management technology. Mainly discusses the presenting, developing and application of workflow management, introduces the workflow management corresponding terms and promotion of workflow standardization organization, present the application status of workflow management system which is a isolated software system and integrated with other software system, thereby pointing the application level and developing trend of workflow management technology. Discuss the issues of integration of workflow management system and other application system such as PDM. The integration of PDM and workflow management system makes PSM system could trail and control product designment and revise procedure, strengthen the degree of automatization of product developing procedure, improve the flexibility and adaptation of PDM system and process management. Meanwhile, analyze and survey the research status of workflow management technology. Mainly emphasize particularly on the existing work, limitation and developing trend on process description language and workflow modeling theory, workflow instance migration and instance running monitoring, service framework of workflow management system, information system access control and the security management of workflow management. On the basis of analyzing workflow key technology, existing work and developing trends, the paper studies the workflow modeling, workf...