Research On Cross-organizational Workflow Process Integration Techniques

Traditional workflow techniques are mainly used to manage business processes within one organization. Along with proliferation of business requirement and progress of computer technology, it is necessary to research cross-organizational workflow process integration techniques, in order to implement process interactions among different organizations and achieve a common business goal. Workflow process integration concerns interactions among processes, and aims at automatic process invocation and information exchange for existing workflow processes. Since e-business and e-government are in rapid development nowadays, workflow process integration techniques will be widely applied; therefore, they are emphasized in both industry and academia.Managed by workflow system, workflow processes are distributed, autonomic and heterogeneous, and complex process interactions occur among them. In order to implement workflow process integration, several problems need to be resolved. They include how to specify process integration model, how to conclude process interaction forms to reuse them, and how to verify process interactions. Based on them, process integration platform will be developed to execute integration model, and to ensure processes to work together. There are already valuable research works recently, but some insufficiency still exists and the research has not been applied widely.For the problems above, with the practice of JadeBird Workflow Management System, some research and practical works on cross-organizational workflow process integration techniques have been done in this dissertation, in aspects of process integration language, process interaction pattern, process integration model analysis and process integration platform, which are as follows.1. A cross-organizational workflow process integration meta-model is proposed. Business Process Definition Metamodel from OMG is modified for the specific problem, which includes explicit definition of message exchange type, addition of message dependency between interactions and assignment of interaction role to splitchoice. Based on it, semiformal process integration modeling techniques are researched.2. A Synchronization Net-based specification method is proposed for workflow process integration. Integration WorkFlow Net connects multiple synchronization nets of related processes through interaction synchronizers, specifies process interaction such as"send-receive"and"synchronization execution", and provides powerful expressive ability. Based on it, formal process integration modeling techniques are researched, and mapping rules from semiformal model to formal model are built.3. A set of process interaction patterns are distilled. They include control dependency, message dependency and multi-part routing patterns, which are used to guide process integration modeling as an effective reuse approach.4. Some model analysis methods are presented to verify throughness of Integration WorkFlow Net model. The formal integration model is transformated to Synchronization Net model through abstraction, encapsulation and projection, and then is verified by model simplification and synchronous reachable graph.5. An implementation mechanism of workflow process integration is designed, and a prototype of workflow process integration platform is developed correspondingly. Through registration, binding and collaboration, workflow processes can interact with each other based on integration model. The platform has the Broker-style software architecture, mainly including process integration manager and process proxy.