Research On Web Services Based Collaboration For Business Process

Traditional workflow technology is limited to intra-enterprise application integration. With the quickly development of internet, support for business collaboration between enterprises has been the most pressing demand for business integration in new decades. Up to now, varies of solution have been raised to support business collaboration, but some faults still exist, such as exposure of intra-process, tightly binding of collaboration partner and lack of flexibility.The emergence of web service has brought new chance for business collaboration. In order to overcome those faults lying in current solution for business collaboration, in this thesis we bring forward a new collaboration model that can provide flexible and loose solution to inter-enterprise business collaboration, In this model, web service is the base element for collaboration, and conversation logic has been separated from intra-enterprise business logic. The model provides conversation support for intra-enterprise business process, exposing only the web service interface and its choreography so that enterprise can conceal intra-business process from its collaborators and rivals.In order to understand conversation policy, we should describe the conversation policy in a uniform way which can be generated from different collaboration patterns. In this thesis, we introduce a conversation policy description language CPDL. CPDL, based on XML, can describe the action and choreography between collaborators. CPDL is an abstract description language that can't be executed, so we introduce another conversation process execution language CPEL, which describes one partner's conversation policy in a process' view. Every conversation partner executes CPEL process to control web service choreography and realize conversation logic, we introduce the arithmetic of translating CPDL to CPEL. In this thesis we also defined the concept of well-formedness as a semantic correctness criteria for conversation policy.A prototype system ISFLOW/Collaborator, based on the collaboration model and collaboration description language, is implemented. In this thesis, we introduce ISFLOW's architecture and its realization technology. We focus on architecture of conversation server, the structure of conversation interpreter, its schedule arithmetic and realization technology.