Research On Workflow Modeling And Engine Design In Enterprise Resource Planning Environment

With the development of the management theory, the forming of virtual enterprises among corporations requires the dynamic organization structure of lots of multinational enterprises to be constructed during the management process to implement the management process of defining new product. The dynamic organization can be rapidly reconfigured according to the change of such things as management processes, markets, collaborative companies, and so on. A mass of functions of the primary system must be reused in the new one. In order to achieve these objections, it is necessary to investigate the workflow technology, especially the distributed and dynamic workflow technology, which across the enterprise boundary.The services-oriented ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rule is a workflow modeling method in the Service-Oriented-Architecture. It uses ECA rules to describe the workflow process model. Also it does some modifications to the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition) workflow process meta-model to adapt for the requirements of enterprise environment.The workflow engine is the core of a workflow management system and the execution platform of the process models. According to the complicated and variably business processes and various applications and legacy systems in ERP (Enterprise Resource P1anning) environment, the workflow engine can be divided into three parts, such as a flow engine which is responsible to execution services of the process models, an execution engine which is in charge of interact with applications, and an event subsystem which supports the communication, there for the changes of business logics and the improvements of certain task's realization can be separated in workflow engine.The flow engine is designed for the fast and frequently changes of the management processes in ERP system and the special requirements of exception handling in the task execution. Service-oriented ECA rules are used to describe process models for supporting of process model's dynamic modification. In order to achieve the dynamic Enterprise Application Integration, the execution engine extend the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration specification with the property descriptions to enhance the precision of service discovery and the service negotiation mechanism to filter the candidate services. A case study was provided to describe implementation of the above workflow technologies.