Design And Implementation Of A Flexible Workflow Engine

With the popularity of personal computer and network, workflow was used in enterprise management and production to improve the efficiency and standardization of enterprise. The traditional workflow systems have several defaults in the execution of enterprise business, due to the complexity and diversity of these businesses, such as, they cannot support the new business well, the servers are too centralized to adapt to the different environment, they usually provide too many features, even most of which are not used at all. To solve these problems, the paper gives out a new architecture of workflow engine, named NFlexFlow.The design of NFlexFlow includes the architecture of workflow engine and the metadata model of workflow. The workflow engine is a distributed system and it's scalable. It can load services dynamically and provides application interfaces for the development of new service module. The metadata model of NFlexFlow is scalable, it can extend the model by inheritance to adapt to different applications. The greatest feature of NFlexFlow is that, it implements the workflow engine by defining the asynchronous communication framework. NFlexFlow defines different network points to implement activities. The other feature of NFlexFlow is the cluster of the same type of engine, which can improve the capacity and robustness of the service.The paper introduces the design and implementation of NFlexFlow, including the distributed architecture and the workflow engine and their cluster that based on the architecture. NFlexFlow focuses on the distributed architecture of workflow service, which scatters in different servers. The workflow engine is divided into different work modules by different data types. NFlexFlow put the scalability of architecture and data model of workflow execution server on the first place.