Service-Oriented Workflow Management System

With the progress of Web Services technology, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is widely adopted by much more enterprises to construct their mission critical applications. In this circumstance, traditional workflow management systems can not satisfy the needs of application integration among enterprises around the world, and new workflow management systems are desired to provide the support of Web Services.This paper introduces a Service-Oriented workflow management system called "SOFlow".The architecture of this system is analyzed, and the implementation of this system is presented.In chapters 1 and 2 of this thesis, we first introduce the motivation and concepts of workflow technology. Then, by concentrating on the common workflow management model introduced by WFMC, we explain the architecture, modeling technology, and process control technology of workflow management system, and state the future of workflow technology.In chapter 3, we first introduce Service-Or iented Architecture, whose main characteristic different from traditional architectures is that, enterprise information system with SOA is based on standard technologies, and therefore has the advantages of agility, reusability and interoperability. Then, we introduce Web Services, which is treated as the best way to implement SOA, and the three standard technologies, such as UDDI, WSDL and SOAP, used to implement Web services.In chapter 4, we show in detail an implementation of Service-Oriented workflow management system which is called "SOFlow". We first propose a Service-Oriented workflow description language after a detailed analysis of XPDL; secondly, basing on this language, we present a visual workflowmodeling tool; thirdly, we encapsulate the core components of workflow engine, such as process manager, activity manager, manual task manager, exception handler, and time server, into services respectively; fourthly, by invoking the services provided by the workflow engine, we present a visual monitoring tool to manage and process the client events. Finally, we analyze the advantages of Web Services Agent which simplifies the design and implemtation of the workflow engine and provides more scalability.Long transaction and exception handling are important problems having to be resolved in workflow management systems. Chapter 5 proposes techniques which realize long transaction and exception handling, and therefore, can handle workflow process both staticly and dynamicly.