Research And Implementation Of Workflow Management System Based On Agent

Workflow technology plays a decisive role in promoting enterprise technological progress and the development of the information industry. However classical workflow technology has not been able to satisfy the heavy demand of enterprise application modernized integration for its shortcomings such as tight coupling, worse flexibility and passivity. As a new area of research, Agent technology is currently being tried to use in the workflow management system. As Agent itself has the characteristics of autonomy and intelligence, and relations among Agents are loose coupling, it will surly inject new vitality into the workflow management system.The author takes a dynamics workflow management system as background, do some research on the current development of workflow and related technical. Authors investigate the Agent technology used in the system, design an Agent based workflow management system and realize it. The paper focals on system design, coordination of the Agent, workflow engine design, and process model building. Major research results are as follows:1A new paradigm of the workflow management system based on Agent is proposed. The architecture of the workflow management system is presented, in which Agent is the kernel technology and makes it the cornerstone of constructing the workflow management system.2 This workflow management system uses Agent development platform Aglets based on Java. The author also designs a structure for the cooperative Agents.3 Against the traditional workflow modeling methods' deficiencies, combining workflow prototype models, author chooses XPDL to do workflow modeling, and provides a workflow model example in the paper.4 System workflow engine is the base of the system, author studies the implementation of workflow engine and achieves it.5 Agents in the system rely on communication mechanism to coordination between each other. In multi-Agent system, communication mechanism is as important as the role of language in the human groups. The author uses the communication mechanism in Aglets system to achieve Agent communication.6 To ensure the normal operation of the system, monitoring and error detection is an essential component of the system. The author makes a combination of the system and the monitoring technologies, to handle error in system.