The Research And Implementation Of Workflow Engine Of The Examination And Approval Process

The flexibility and adaptability of office automation (OA) system is one of the key problems in application software nowadays, and how to improve the utilization ratio of the software also becomes an important problem inside. In the development of OA system, the examination and approval process is a major problem that should be solved carefully. For this reason, we introduce the thoughts of workflow management. The greatest merit of workflow management is the separation of information production and information transfer. The workflow engine can adapt to the changes of business flow via revising (re-defining) parts of or whole system function modules. Workflow engine is responsible for part or all of the running and control environment in the execution service, and offers the running environment for handle of the workflow.Based on the development of "Pingxiang office automation system", we emphasis on the technologies of design and implementation of a workflow engine for the examination and approval process. The main content of this thesis includes:1) Put forward the control model based on three-tier of Client/Server structure of workflow engine, namely customer end software, workflow engine of examination and approval server, application database server.2) Based on the analysis and research four major elements of the examination and approval system (namely personnel, resource, incident, state), we design the system architecture and the algorithms of the workflow engine. The implementation technologies are discussed in detail. Considering the efficiency, we implement a smart mechanism to supervise the whole process of the workflow.3) The engine has been integrated into the Pingxiang office automation system smoothly, and put into practice since October of 2002. And the system runs well at present. The result of the first year run shows our workflow engine could provide enough flexibility and adaptability, and meet the change of the business requirements.This thesis summarized our research work finally, and looked forward to the future work.