Rule-based Workflow Management System Design And Implementation

Workflow Management System is a software system, which completed the workflow definition and management, and executed the workflow instance in accordance with the pre-defined computer logic of workflow. Traditional workflow management system is difficult to model complex processes, can't support modifying model dynamically and with low reuse rate. Rule engine is a production expert system which separated the business rules changed by time and space from applications, and provided the pre-defined semantics module for user to write the business rules and configure on-demand. Combining national core,high-end and foundation projects, paper researched rule-based workflow management system.Therefore, we propose a rule-based flexibility workflow engine model. The introduction of the use of business process rules engine, with an idea of separation of business rules, which can be a better solution to the above-mentioned issues. After separation, the business rules are encapsulated into three services:the routing rules service which to determine the dynamics of flow processes when reaching the decision point, the task management rules service which in dealing with complex distribution of tasks. The process can call this service to simplify the business management. The event management rules of service which in relation to a large number of business logic and rules, can be called by process to simplify business management and accelerate the process of implementation. With the help of this workflow engine model, the complex process can be modeling in simply way and process can be executing much faster and the rate of process model reusing can be increasing. In this paper we conduct an in-depth research on this rule-based workflow system. First of all, there is a short summary of workflow and rule engine. Then we present a detailed analysis of advantages and disadvantages of the existing modeling methods and descript the formalized description of rule-based workflow model and raised the state transformation mechanism and routing mechanism of this model. This paper also designed the architecture of the rule-based workflow model system, with process management and rules management and rule engine service model, and conducted a deep study on the dynamic modify strategy of the process of this system. In end, we designed and implemented an on-line book orders prototype system to verify the feasibility of the model, and tested the performance to verify reliability of model system.