Research On An Event-Based Collaborative Workflow Management System Supporting Virtual Enterprise

With Internet and distributed computing technologies, enterprises can achieve business collaboration in business-to-business (B2B) e-business. Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) takes a significant role in this domain. For the sake of affiliations among different organizations, some forms of alliance could be established, which appear to be relatively stable. Such alliance is what we commonly call Virtual Enterprise, whose styles of affiliation could be diversiform and may need frequently adjusting to adapt the situation. The WfMSs supporting inter-organizational collaboration should adjust readily and accordingly.The goal of this paper was to study and bring forward a model of collaborative WfMS to support diversiform virtual enterprises whose styles of affiliation are easily to change. The infrastructure of the system was based on event technology. First of all, this paper discussed how to design an efficient distributed event service system. In what follows, a flexible workflow model was introduced. Then, a fine-grain workflow transaction model was surveyed. Finally, exception handling technology was introduced.Within the event service system, a object-oriented approach was brought forward to extract the work of event evaluating and correlating from traditional event service systems, which was implemented according to the semantic of application, so as to attach more flexibility to the event service system. A seriers of algorithms on event detection and subscription forwarding, etc. were introduced to provide efficient event service. With respect to workflow modeling, a suit of theories on WF-net were presented to support diversiform styles of (collaborative) workflows, workflow evolution and cooperation among heterogeneous wokflows. Aiming at the characteristics of long-term task in workflow, a workflow transaction model based on backward recovery was surveyed, which could avoid the situation of reading dirty data, simplify confliction analysis, and provide efficient workflow transaction management. Finally, an approach of exception handling was introduced, so that the system could work well under the condition of exception and become more consummate.