Service Oriented Workflow Management System And Its Reliability Research

Workflow technology is one of the most active research areas and it is the main method of integration between intra- or inter- organizations. Workflow model is the computerized representation of business process, which displays corresponding business logic and business rules in computer and compute them[1,2]. Business process is a set of many business activities, which are arranged collaboratively to reach the common goal according to some rules. Business activities normally corresponding to concrete application logic are practical units that can finish specific function.Web is for the interactions between program and user, while the Web Services is for the interactions between programs. Web Services make e-Commerce much cheaper, deployment much quicker and afford new opportunities. Web Services also make integrations between applications much quicker, easier and cheaper. Integrations, which focus on service semantic more than net protocol semantic message, happen at the higher protocol layer achieve business function integrate loosely. All those features are very ideally to connect business functions between intra- or inter- corporations via web.ISFLOW is a workflow management system developed by Technology Center of Software Engineering, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences. ISFLOW can integrate existing program agilely by defining all external applications (including Web Services) as Services. The final workflow can be deployed as Web Services in order to be integrated by other application conveniently.This paper introduces what work the author has engaged in surround ISFLOW system.ISFLOW is a service-oriented workflow management system, which uses all integrated applications by treating them as services in universal format. In chapter 4, we introduce the infrastructure of ISFLOW, and descript the model of workflow, and show the main algorithms, dead path elimination algorithm and instance running algorithm, using in runtime.In chapter 5, we introduce our research in reliability of workflow structure for guaranteeing there is no error in the running flow model, which is the validation algorithm of structure correction that base on expression. Dislike any other researches, we analysis possible relations between expressions, and conflict of different structures from the expression view. In the end of this chapter, we provide the validation algorithm, which can be used before flow model deployed to the process server.The right structure flow can't promise there is no exception in the running time. So, a mature WfMS should have the ability of handling exception. In Chapter 6, we designed a very powerful and agile exception-handling module, which has already been used in ISFLOW. We can change exception-handling strategy very easily without redeploy the workflow by separation of the definition of workflow and it's exception-handling file.Finally, we make a conclusion, and point what we can do at the next step.