The Research And Implementation Of Workflow Modeling Based On XPDL

The quality of workflow input into workflow system is key to the success of the implementation of workflow system. Therefore, workflow modeling has grown to be one of the major research topics in the area of workflow management.Workflow system is divided into two stages by WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition), which are process design & definition (build time) and process instantiation & control (run time). Build-time functions mainly complete the computerized definition of business process, i.e. process modeling. Although workflow technology is the core technology of business process automation, what is really interpreted and run by workflow management system is workflow model. So the rationality of workflow modeling is a very important factor which concerns the improvement of corporation informatization, operating efficiency and core competitive edge.In this paper, first an overview of workflow management technology is given and workflow concepts are introduced. And then we go deep into workflow modeling and make a careful study of the advantages and disadvantages of workflow modeling by directed graph, formalism, petri-net and so on. Based on the work above, with Interface 1 and XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) standard issued by WfMC, we research the advantage of describing workflow model with XPDL. Later on, based on the theoretical research above, we design and realize a workflow modeling tool based on MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture (WfModelBuilder), which is most characterized by displaying workflow model by graphs and storing workflow model in XPDL form. In this way, It is not only convenient for users to model business process with workflow technology, but also easy for workflow model to run in a heterogeneous environment. Besides, WfModelBuilder can also do workflow verification to some extent, including complete grammar verification, structure verification and simple semantic verification.At last, an effective method for workflow structure verification is presented. This method uses some relevant algorithms in the area of directed graphs to do workflow verification. And a mechanism of extended directed graph adjacency matrix is made to check the invalid structure which often occurs in workflow models. WfModelBuilder just uses this method to do workflow verification.