Design And Implementation Of The Distributed Workflow Management System Based On CORBA And XML

Process integration using workflow technology provides an efficient approach to implement enterprise application integration flexibly. By separating the application logic from the process logic and organizing humans, information and application tools together properly, process integration not only makes the system most efficient, but also helps the enterprise achieve its business goal.What Workflow Management System (WfMS) can do is to convert the business process logic into certain computerized formal definition, and to complete the execution and management of the workflow under its drive as well. Compared with the traditional centralized architecture, distributed WfMS has such characteristics as higher performance, higher scalability and higher reliability, so that it can meet the requirements workflow applied to the large scale, distributed and heterogeneous environments.In this paper, we firstly put forward a distributed WfMS architecture based on CORBA technology to meet the requirements such as performance, scalability, reliability, support of invoking extern application and data distributing, we then implement its prototype with Java and also do a case study; Secondly, we design a process definition language described by XML, which has a strong ability of expression; Thirdly, XML is adopted to describing the workflow relevant data and transferring the parameters,which handles the complex data type very well; Finally, the further research task is pointed out.We mainly discuss and make some contributions to the problems such as distributed architecture of WfMS, XML Process Definition Language, description and management of the workflow relevant data, encapsulation and transfer of parameters, agent for invoking extern application etc.