| The researcher, developer and customer have focused much on the research and application in the technology of workflow during several years. However the limit in the implementing technology and application field piled up the new conception of CSCW, EDI and OA. With the permeation of high capability microcomputer, all these will come true. Today the size of enterprise and information resource are growing quickly. Facing this heterogeneous, distributed and relaxed coupling computing circumstance, the distributing transacting technologies(WWW,CORBA,OLE,Java)indicate the end of the former centralizing information transaction. To realize all these, firstly, a heterogeneous and distributed implementation environment in which a relative task can be effected by the valid centralizing management must be established, So the Workflow Management System comes into being.Many businesses and IT communities have profited from the power of redesigned business processes that leverage workflow and document management technologies to automate and empower their workforce. Organizations are now faced with the opportunity of creating an extended enterprise network environment of users across multiple IT environments to manage business processes across a whole enterprise, as well as across multiple organisations.To provide such a valuable service across heterogeneous systems requires standards. The Workflow management Coalition has employed some of the finest authorities in this specialist field to work on this topic, and the result is he WfMC Workflow interoperability Definition. The WfMC first defined a Workflow Reference model with five Interfaces. Then teams were assigned to each. Interface 4 describes the method of passing a workflow activity from one workflow engine to another. WfMC Interface 4 is a milestone publication depicting the importance of standards for mission-critical E-Commerce and E-Business applications. When implemented together with document management standards, this definition enables organisations to co-ordinate work between distributed groups of employees, share work with business partners (suppliers and customers), and share in the control of the entire process.Organisations will now be able to pass workflow items to external workflow systems owned and managed by commercial partners. This is the facility which organisations have been waiting for, in order to establish meaningful supply chains across networks. Thus a major car manufacturer can pass an incomplete workflow process to a supplier who will accept the message as an event which commences their part of the process. It is anticipated that chains involving many participants will be established. Members of the WfMC see that process-centric workflow engines will be the basis for the next generation for electronic commerce, and believe that it will replace many EDI activities.E-commerce based on workflow engines, provides: Inter-Organisation business process automationLow cost secure messaging facilities to enhance all aspects of commercial activity that can be automated.Business to business work process managementParallel processing of multi-participant commercial activitiesBasic services to facilitate outsourcingSupport for the macro economic trend towards global manufacturing and tradingFirst we introduced the background and the development of the technology of the workflow management ,also we introduced a series of the specifications and criterions which include the reference model and some basic concept presented by the Workflow Management Coalition .And we described the details of an workflow interoperation example in the multi-engine Workflow Management System.Interface 4 enables one conforming workflow engine to pass data to another that interprets the arrival as an event to commence a workflow activity. It is likely, but not inevitable, that the workflow engines can interpret a common process definition. Certainly there has to be a common view of key workflow process definitions, such as:- activity, application,...
|
PDF Full Text Request