A Formal Semantic Study Of The Work Flow Based On Activity Graph Model

Work flow is a running business process whose management is related to the control and cooperation of work flow. The management of work flow is a technology which has been widely used in the field and has been developed rapidly. The main features of it are to automatize the process and to cooperate the people with all kinds of applied tools in order to complete the business activity. The management of work flow has been widely used in office environment, industry and commerce, manufacturing and so on. The purpose of the management of work flow is to make the appropriate people or software execute right task in appropriate time. The concern of work flow is the automation of management process which improves the level of productive organization and efficiency by transmitting documents, information or tasks among the participants according to a series of defining rules.The core of work flow model is the definition of business process which includes the basic activities and the temporal relation between them. However, the technology of work flow in itself is of much immaturity. In the model description of work flow, the technology of work flow is lacking in the formal mathematical model which supports the process definition and analysis. Consequently, it is lacking in the measures to analyze the integrity, validity and reliability of work flow. Although some models have formal mathematical description, there is still some distance between the mathematical description and the basic description of work flow as viewed from the model ability.Taking account of those problems, the author imported UML into the description of work flow and expanded it according to its features, and also put forward the idea of work flow modeling of super activity graph based on the UML activity graph. This idea not only had the features and advantages of the UML activity graph, but also improved the descriptive ability of complicated control condition to make it more suitable for work flow modeling, allowing for the influence of outside accidents, temporal sequence and operation control onthe work flow operation path. Meanwhile, the semantics of syntactical structure, constraint condition and super activity graph were discussed. This idea defined the formal semantics appropriate for work flow for super activity graph and completed the establishment of the mathematical model of work flow. Apart from that, the executive algorithm of the activity graph in the formal semantics of work flow activity graph were put forward. This idea provided the foundation for the justification of the corresponding work flow functional requirement to the formal semantics by means of model examination.