Research On Workflow-based Key Technologies Of Business Process Management

Based on the technologies of computer network, workflow, EAI and XML, Business Process Management (BPM) can manage the enterprises entirely from the perspective of business process and support the continuous improvement of business processes. The main idea of BPM is to provide a unified environment to model, execute and monitor all kinds of business processes in the enterprise or between the enterprises. At present, the former production technologies and business management patterns have become difficult to meet the increasingly complex, changeable, dynamic market requirements and people gradually realized the necessity and importance of performing the optimization and management of business processes. The research on the business process management technologies has received significant attention in the domain of enterprise information. Being a key enable technology for the modern enterprises to implement management and control of business processes, the workflow technology provides a whole framework for the business processes of the enterprise, which includes modeling, maintenance, execution and analysis.In recent years, research on process modeling, execution, analysis and monitor involved in BPM are developing in greater depth, but there are still a lot of problems eager to be solved during the course of business process management. Since 2001, the author has participated in some enterprise information projects cooperated with a software company and found that there are many problems in the enterprise information that can be solved by the technologies of BPM. Thus, based on the technology of workflow, the thesis conducts a research on key technologies of BPM about Business Process Modeling, Business Process Security and Process Mining.The main results and contributions included in the thesis are as following:Firstly, the thesis summarizes the state of arts in the research of BPM.The thesis analyses and discusses the background of BPM, the key enabled techonologies of BPM, the main research contents and the current research state, problems and developing trends of BPM. The contents discussed above are the base of further research.Secondly, the thesis studies the methods of complex workflow modeling and scheduling in the environment of grid.The infrastructure of the enterprise information environment is developing towards the grid and the traditional technologies of BPM need to be changed to solve the new problems produced in the grid. Process modeling and scheduling of grid workflow are important research tasks for the current business process management technologies.The thesis analyses the differences between the grid workflow and the traditional workflow. To solve the problems existed in process modeling and scheduling, the thesis provides a planning algorithm which can perform workflow modeling automatically and a market-driven dynamic schedule algorithm. The planning algorithm for automatically modeling utilizes the data structure of tree to support blocks of choice, parallel and loop and gets the result process described in Petri nets which enhances the consistency support to the application. The scheduling algorithm considers the limitations of the access cost and deadline of grid resources, thus it can adapt the rapid change of the resource load in the grid better and meet the need of the grid system and users. A prototype grid workflow platform called JLGF is designed and implemented, which imports the Web Services and Agent into the implementation and uses the interaction of service instances to complete the functions of grid workflow modeling and the task execution. An application example of downloading large files explains the effectivity of these two algorithms and the support JLGF gives to the grid applications.Thirdly, the thesis discusses the access control model and strategy in the business process security management.There are numerous users in the large-scale and inter-enterprises Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) and the work of the system security are very important and hard. Furthermore, the businesses sharing in the network may become the objects to be attacked in the network of next generation. Thus, how to guarantee the security of the business processes is a significant problem that the future process management must solve.The thesis extends the traditional role-based access control model named as RBAC and provides an access control model called xRBAC which can authorize the data objects. Combing the workflow management with the lifecycle management, a UML-based product lifecycle process model named as UPLPM is put forward and its special access control strategy is given based on xRBAC. The practical application of xRBAC and UPLPM in a PDM system illustrates that our access control model and strategy can effectively support the security management of enterprise business processes.Fourthly, the thesis studies the technology of process mining in the domain of business process intelligence.Process mining is a new research area which aims at distilling knowledge from the process logs to rebuild the process model and supporting the process verification, process analysis and optimization. Process mining is an important technology to support business process intelligence and the research about it has begun to receive significant attention. However, all the existing heuristic-based mining algorithms have their limitations. There are still many challenging problems that the existing mining algorithms cannot handle. Duplicate tasks are one of them. It refers to the situation that one process model (e.g., a Petri net) has two or more tasks owning the same name. It is very difficult for the current mining algorithms to distinguish the task in one case from another cognominal task in the other case.The thesis emphasizes to solve the problem of duplicate tasks in the WF-nets. Combing the techniques of machine learning and theα-algorithm, an improved process mining algorithm calledα** is presented. Based on summarizing six kinds of possible positions between the duplicate tasks and learning the properties of duplicate tasks from several different workflow logs which include these six relations and have different structure complexity, the theorems to judge the duplicate tasks and their validity proof are given. Then, theα**-algorithm which can mine the duplicate tasks in the WF-nets is provided and the validity of theα**-algorithm is proven. The results of experiment shows that the mining results of theα**-algorithm are correct. And the comparison with the experimental results of the other mining algorithms illustrates that our algorithm has higher efficiency.Fifthly, the thesis does the research on an interactive business process management function model and the prototype system.Most of the products of BPMS in current market provide limited functions to support process modeling of complex business processes and the communication between the processes. It is hard to meet the need of distributed operations of inter-enterprises and the complicated business information.The thesis introduces an interactive business process management function model called IBPMFM, which adopts the xRBAC as the organization-role model and uses the event management model to implement the communication and interaction of the business processes. A business processes interaction algorithm named as WPI is given. And the architecture of the BPM prototype system called JQ/cBPM based on IBPMFM is provided. On the J2EE platform, the design and implementation of the core parts are completed and some models and algorithms introduced by the thesis are implemented and validated preliminarily.The study results of the thesis, especially of process modeling, security and intelligence, are of both theoretical and practical benefit to further researches of business process management technologies and can promote the enterprise information.