Research And Implementation Of Workflow Management System Under Distributed And Heterogeneous Circumstances

Workflow technology is the core technology for the enterprises to model, simulate, analyze, manage and integrate their business processes. It can streamline the business processes, and improve the competitiveness of the enterprises. However, two trends are coming together that are extending the business processes to crossing the organizational boundaries. One is a business trend towards increasing globalization. The other is the rapid improvement in information technology, especially the Internet. There is a trend that business processes is more distributed and heterogenous. To meet this need, Workflow management system must have distributed and heterogenous system structure, and to be able to manage multi-organizations and cooperative business processes in the way of process-oriented on the higher level. This thesis gives a distributed and heterogenous workflow management system structure, analyses and research on some key problems such as distributed business modeling flows, basic communication mechanism and access controlling are also done here.At first, this thesis gives introductions of the theory and development of workflow technology, WfMS and DWfMS, a survey of J2EE, XML, SOAP and LDAP is given. Second, on the basis of analyses and research on distributed implementation architecture of DWfMS, this thesis gives design principle and systematic structure of message transmission based on SOAP Message-Oriented Middleware and access controlling based on LDAP directory service. In the following, a distributed modeling flow architecture is given which can model business processes in graphical method and save workflow model as XPDL format are presented, according to the criterion of MfMC Interface 1 and XPDL. This architecture makes it convenient to model business processes and to be implemented on heterogenous workflow management platforms. Aiming at some key problems of distributed implementation and message communication among workflow engines, SOAP technology is imported into the design of Message-Oriented Middleware, which is used to resolve the basic communication problems of distributed WfMS. Furthermore, in order to ensure the security and bearability of workflow engines and directory services, this thesis design distributed...