The Research Of Workflow Management System In Distributed And Heterogeneous Environment

Nowadays, many enterprises have set up lots of information systems in order to improve the productivity, to adapt to the continuous market changing and to fully meet the requirements of customers. The business processes are running in all kinds of such heterogeneous information systems. But, the stiff architecture and inflexibility in these systems much prohibit the business processes from rapidly responding to market.It is a big challenge for enterprises that how to use existing information platform to make business processes rapidly adapted to the market changing. This paper presents a workflow management system, called PWFMS-DHE, which can run in distributed and heterogeneous environment.The First chapter introduces the object, the current research state, the target and the significance of this research. The second chapter and the third chapter give a description of workflow background and related distributed computing methods. After those, chapter four presents the architecture of PWFMS-DHE. PWFMS-DHE is a distributed system based on P2P technology, which includes three types of peers: process defining peer, task executing peer and monitoring peer. Workflow processes can be stored and executed in a distributed manner in PWFMS-DHE. Compared with the workflow management systems built in traditional C/S architecture, the capacity of PWFMS-DHE will be improved instead of being declined, as the number of users (peers) increases.The process definition language, known as XPDL, which was presented by Workflow Management Coalition, is modified and expanded in chapter four in order to meet such requirement that the process definition should be stored and initialized in distributed manner. Additionally, a reference...