Study And Application Of A Workflow Metamodel Supporting Dynamic

The practical applications of workflow management system(WFMS)demand that WFMS should support dynamic changing. To satisfy this requestthe designing model of traditional Workflow must be improved. Having theability of handling complex transaction in heterogeneous environment,workflow is coming into notice in the area of science research,e-government, e-business, there are lots of research achievements andproductions. Related research work are all focused on some specialchanging issues.Major parts of the studies are concentrated in theworkflow scheduling, interface with database, etc, few efforts are putinto the researches of architecture, model,definition language ofworkflow management system and management interface.In this paper, workflow meta-model of WfMC is analyzed. The meta-modelis derived from the traditional laws of building model and the laws ofchanging,A process meta-model is proposed to guide the design of woekflowprocess model.The process meta-model supports dynamic changes of workflowprocess,and according to real cases, extensions and modifications toworkflow meta-model , workflow definition language and managementinterface are introduced, the meta-model describes the dynamiccharacteristics behaved in objects of process,activity,activityattributes.A workflow model educed from this meta-model will possess theability of interacting with human and the ability of handling dynamicchanging.This process meta-model enables the dynamic characteristics tobe described in build-time and enables the changes of a process to behandled with these pre-defined characteristics. Based on this meta-model,a workflow management system possesses the flexibility without losing thecontrol of workflow process, so as to satisfy the increasing variabilityof business process and application of new technologies.