Research On Flexible Workflow Techniques Based On ECA Rules

Nowadays, Workflow Management System (WfMS) has not gained the expected success in the commercial application. One of the reasons is that in almost all the WfMS, Workflow Model simplifies and limits the real business process, it only handles the completely predefined and predictable process. This affects the effects in the real world. However, because modern enterprise processes change frequently, the Workflow Model should have strong describable ability and be able to consummate step by step in the running phase. We must support the requirement in the modelling layer. The flexibility of workflow is the abilities that the workflow can adapt the changes of requirement and environment.The describable ability of workflow modelling tool is the key of resolving the flexible problem of workflow system. This article mainly studies how to strength the flexibility of the workflow using ECA rules based on the traditional graphical modelling tool. ECA rules not only can describe the traditional Workflow Model, but also have more powerful describable abilities. In some cases, partly dynamic creation of the Workflow Instance resolves the unpredictable problem of the Workflow Model before running. Dynamically changing the model by ECA rules, we can dynamically deploy the workflow process.The article builds the architecture of the Workflow Management System and implements a rule engine which can run in the distributed and heterogeneous environment and interprets the ECA rules.