Research On Modeling Techniques And Tools For Workflow-Oriented Applications

Workflow has been becoming a more and more important concept both in office automation and in enterprise automation with regard to network based computer application systems. Based on the experience gained in the project "Yuxi Court Case Management Information System (YX-CCMIS)", the author has directed her effort to the modeling techniques and tools for design of workflow oriented application systems.In this dissertation, a comprehensive description of the YX-CCMIS is provided, where two novel techniques were introduced in order to give a better representation of the workflow oriented feature. The EDFD (Extended Data Flow Diagram) is promptly invented to solve the inadequacy of the traditional DFD technique in specifying data flow constraints, while the PCSD (Processing Control Sequence Diagram) is partially borrowed from time-sequence diagram widely used in netwbrk community.Having finished with the YX-CCMIS, the author continued her work on workflow oriented techniques, with a special interest in modeling techniques and description tools. In order to improve the techniques including those used in development of the YX-CCMIS, a comprehensive study of workflow oriented techniques and models is presented in this dissertation. As a result, a modeling procedure and a modeling description tool called the EMTWA (Extended Modeling Tool for Workflow oriented Application system) are tentatively introduced, and definition of a symbol set for describing the model is also provided as an extension to existing techniques. In order to demonstrate its workability, partial description of YX-CCMIS is used as an example.