A Distributed Workflow System Research And Design Based On SOAP Message Transfer

Workflow management has evolved a mature technology during the last decade and has been applied successfully in many areas. However, two trends are coming together that are extending the business process to crossing the organizational boundaries .One is a business trend towards increasing globalization .The other is the rapid improvement in Informantion Technology, especially the Internet. The number of collaborative business processes where multiple partners are involved is increasing rapidly.the traditional workflow technologies tending to manage single business process within one organization show their limitations while be confronted with such business processes management requirements. The new features of business jprocesses require that the WfMSs should have distributed and loosely coupled architecture and be able to deal with workflow processes which across multiple organizations in a process-oriented manner .At the same time, as a distributed communication protocol , SOAP can provide a communication infrastructure for implementing distributed workflow management system. The component model and architecture of SOAP message transfer based distributed workflow management system are introduced in this thesis. Solutions to some key problems such as distributed executing of workflow engine are also presented here.First, a survey of SOAP and XML is given. The theory and development of workflow technology are emphasized.Second, this thesis proposes the architeture of the SOAP message transfer based workflow system. The component model and architecture of SOAP message transfer based distributed workflow management system are provided in this thesis.In the following, solutions to some key problems such as distributed executing fo workflow engine and message transfer between worflow engines are presented here..Finally, this thesis makes a conclusion about the SOAP message transfer based workflow system researched and designed in this thesis.