Research And Application Of Transaction Process In Workflow System

Workflow Management is an important branch in computer technology. It is process management centered. Originally, this technology emerging from fields of process management in office automation system in 1970s, since then, it developed an new technology aim at business process management. During about twenties years, workflow technology has been developed increasingly and used widely. The original centralized homogeneous and desktop oriented technology has developed toward distributed heterogenous and network oriented technology. With the environment become more complex, the Workflow Management System needs more reliability and stability.Transaction process is come of the research fields of database management system, adopting the data-centric approach, aim at ensure data consistency. Transaction in traditional database application is not interactive, and run little time. So accustomed method of transaction process, concurrency control and recovery can support well those applications. Our research start is how to attach the transaction process character into workflow management system, to ensure the data consistency in workflow.In this paper we analysis the difference between the transaction in WfMS and traditional transaction, advanced transaction. Based on the analysis we concluded what's the most important and difficult in the transaction processing in WfMS. With the conclusion, a WfMS model with transactional feature was proposed. To make the workflow management system to be more reliable and robust, in the model, we add the level of transactional processing to activity and define transaction sphere to the model. From the application point of view, we expanded the transaction sphere. In the transaction sphere we provide the rules for transaction recovery to guarantee the workflow process be correct and consistent. We discuss the design and implementation of the transaction expression in Process Definition Subsystem and Enactment Service Subsystem of Flex Work, which is a workflow management system with support of transaction. We expect that our work will do some help in the Transactional Workflow Management System on both scientific and utility aspect.