The Design And Realization Of A Business Process Control Mechanism Based On Resource State Transition

In business process management domain, correctness, standardization and interoperation are three points that every enterprise will focus on. Top managers of corporations are concerned about how to adapt a reliable process control mechanism or to provide an optimized management system during the execution of process. In order to promote the information feedback and user transparency compared to a traditional activity-based process, to avoid the exceptions caused by complicated process definitions, and to overcome the deficiency of traditional SOAP/WSDL based web services (i.e. lack of addressability and uniform interfaces), this paper proposed a resource information-based business process definition method and a REST-based resource-oriented architecture of workflow platform, tracking the real-time information of a business process by the resource states during runtime.Firstly this paper proposed a new way to define workflow based on resource information interaction. For a workflow system which is designed in core of resources, it requires a uniform resource representation to prevent system interaction problems caused by various representations of their own resource models. Therefore, this paper gave a formal resource meta-model representation through the definition of business resources, resource activity and activity states, constraints, rules and so on. Also, we put forward a new concept of resource state place, which is the combination of the states of business resources, to reflect the inner information of our business process. In order to fix the process scheduling and controlling problem, we design a state machine to track the information of our business resources and the whole workflow. And we presented our process control mechanism based on the constraints and rules set of the resource activity states.Secondly, this paper proposed a REST-based resource-oriented workflow platform architecture, named as resource workflow. We analyzed the functional needs of the core process engine and designed it accordingly. Then we gave an overall framework of our resource workflow platform and respectively clarified the functionality of each module under each layer (user layer, business logic layer, and data layer).Finally we elaborated the specific details of the realization of our resource workflow platform, and designed a traditional dinner-ordering scenario to verify that our process control mechanism and architecture style can ensure the correct execution of process and track the process information in real time. According to the research work of this paper, we can know that the process control mechanism based on resource state transition under REST-based resource-oriented workflow platform can effectively track and give feedbacks of the process information, thus providing enterprises with a new solution to business process management and control.