Workflow Techniques Supporting Business Process Reengineering

Facing the complex modern production environment and the increasingly fierce market competition environment, one of the most important means is to adapt advanced information management technology to realize and improve business process. Improvement of business process continuously is the main task of Business Process Reengineering, shortly BPR in current business process change management phase. Accordingly, workflow technology as a modeling tool for enterprise, process optimization and implement is paid more attentions. How to improve business process continuously and to be up against complex business environment using workflow technology has already become a major research issue of enterprise software and applications, shortly ESA.To meet the requirement of enhancing the efficiency of business process continuously, on the background of software component and workflow technology, aiming at the fact that business change can impact ESA, we analyzed the structure and semantics of workflow model, as well as runtime workflow from three levels, namely workflow model, software component and ESA. We have also proposed and researched some business process reconfiguration related key problems.Firstly, to describe and support business process change, beginning with analyzing the features of enterprise business, supported by workflow reference model of Worklfow Management Coalition, we have researched workflow modeling method based on business object. Analyzed business management mode in enterprises, we have researched software architecture based on software component and workflow technology. As a theory framework, researches are done as followed:(1) Workflow model changing. According to the characteristics about local and incessancy when workflow model changes, to improve efficency and reduce complexity of maintenance, the minimality of workflow model changing is researched based on topology analysis. Firstly, the principle for partitioning has been researched. Stability subgraph of workflow activity is defined. Then, how to calculate the changing minimal region, and how to verify the correctness of model, mainly in data read-write relationship have been researched also. (2) The integrity of workflow model. In order to insure workflow model semantics integrated, that is holding its integrity, to improve the success at runtime, the problem, integrity verification of workflow model semantics, is researched. The method to verify soundness of workflow model is researched, though verifying its semantic integrity, based on analysis to workflow model topology and semantics. The method is a supplementary for workflow model verification technology. Finally, aiming at complex workflow model semantics, how to construct the correct complex and nested workflow control structure is proposed.(3) Workflow executing. To improve success of workflow at runtime, invalid path should be identifying. Workflows may not be able to excute smoothly or even successfully because of kinds of constraint, though they have correct model. To avoid stagnation at runtime as far as possible, the validity of workflow running paths are identified based on satisfiability of constraint, by analyzing constraint and timeliness and relativity between them. This method could change business entironment such as resource, so that the success of workflow executing is improved greatly.(4) Efficiency of components. Composition and scheduling of software components based on frequency change of business. To improve efficiency of components reuse continuously, namely component extraction, composition and deployment, after analyzed the impact to workload of component execution caused by business frequency change, as well as the relationship between component composition and reuse efficiency, a method for improving component composition structure is proposed. To improve the efficiency of instantiating component, a scheduling prediction model for component cache preload is researched. This method gets rid of the defect that the characteristic of workflow is not considered fully, and so increasing the accuracy of scheduling prediction.Finally, in order to proof theoretics of the thesis, a prototype system of workflow engine was developed. The engine has several characteristics fitting reengineering to support software architecture proposed and to improve ESA effiency. Furthermore, by applied to two subsystems, there are fine effects on business process reengineering and efficiency optimizing.