Petri Net Workflow Modeling And Workflow Engine Of The Workflow Management System Flowstep

With the development of network technologies, many application fields on information management based upon networks have emerged and tended to be mature. E-commerce, E-affairs for government, office automatism (OA) and enterprises information system have become the focal points of the applications on Management Information Systems (MIS). In these fields, Business Process Management (BPM) is a common concerned problem. Different application fields contain different business requirements, and with the evolution of the application environments, corresponding business processes may be changed. Therefore, introducing the concept of workflow into MIS and making the MIS possess the capabilities of auto-adaptability and reconfiguration are rather important.This paper introduces the application of Petri net and XML in Workflow modeling and a kind of distributed Workflow Management System based on web——Flowstep。Firstly, this paper introduces the basic knowledge on Workflow and Petri net and the architecture of constructing a Workflow Management System. And It analyzes the architecture and running mechanism of Workflow Management System——Flowstep. In the middle of this paper, six kinds of basic Petri net flow modules which conform to Workflow model are put forward. The method of transforming Petri net flow model to XPDL and constructing Petri network using XPDL is given. These establish the base for different modeling method using Petri net. And these extend EJB task engine and Subprocess task engine of distributed Workflow Management System——Flowstep.Finally,this paper brings forward some prospect on the application of Petri net,Workflow and XML. And the research direction of Flowstep system is proposed.