Research Of The Workflow Model Simulation Technology And Development Of The Simulation System

In recent years, the workflow technology has been used widely in the area of bank, business, insurance, project management and many others. More and more software vendors and research institutions have already moved there attention to its future and broad market prospect.As the development and widespread application of workflow technology, the scale and complexity of workflow process model grows unceasingly. It will take enormous loss to an enterprise if there were some bugs in their running workflow process models. For this reason, we use simulation method to analyze and estimate the workflow process models before running. It can find the bottle-neck points, dead-locks and other factors which are not in reason. Its goal is to help the decider or information manager to do some optimization on the workflow process model or resources configuration.This paper is written based on the studying on workflow theory and simulation technology. We extend the workflow process meta model of workflow management coalition, combine the simulation environment and properties of activity entry for simulation with the meta model, raise a workflow process model for simulation, which can provide information to simulation engine while doing simulation, and then we extend the XPDL standards according to the workflow process model for simulation by adding some entities and properties, make a XPDL model as a model ready for simulation.At the same time, we combine the simulation technology and workflow technology together, choose the simulation technology for workflow and make a target collection for workflow estimation. And in this foundation, we developed a workflow simulation system, which can extend any XPDL standard workflow models and do the simulation.At the end of this paper, we make a workflow example to do the extension and simulation based on the developing achievement. According to the simulation results, we make an estimation of the example workflow model, point out its mistake and illogicality, modify the model and change the simulation environment and then simulate it again, and so on. Finally optimize the workflow process model.