A New Development Method For Information Systems Based On Workflow Modeling Technique

The traditional information systems support some functions of anorganization mainly through their powerful information processing ability, but notdirectly support the control dependences between those functions. Workflow is anewly emerging technology that can be used to manage the control dependencesbetween business processes. Therefore we will discuss in this paper how tocombine the traditional information systems with the workflow technology toenable the management of control dependences between business processes so thatthe traditional information systems can support the business process in anorganization, from the point of view of software development method.We first propose the concept of process centered information systems, inwhich the business process is emphasized as the main line rather than only theinformation processing aspect took into account in constructing the informationsystems. The business process is supported by the workflow technology, which canbe used to separate the process from the functions and data that implement theprocess so that the information systems are flexible in reacting to changingprocesses. The development method of process-centered information systems willbe supported by workflow modeling techniques.In order for easy analysis and application of the workflow models, we proposean idea of dividing the models into three levels: visual level, logical level andimplementing level, which are used respectively for describing the using style ofthe users, the logic of the application and the mechanism of the implementation.We propose an object-oriented workflow modeling method for logical levelmodeling. This method provides components from functional, behavioral,informational and organizational aspects for modeling. With the concept ofcomplex object, the functional modeling components realize the decomposing offunctions, which make it easy to understand a complex problem. The behavioralaspect supports the process control through an event mechanism that consists ofevent class, event reacting class, event detecting class and event referenceregistering class. By defining the events and the calculation of composed eventsunder distributed environments, this modeling method can be used to model the...