The Research And Application Of Distributed Workflow Based On EECA

With the increasing prevalence of Internet and Intranet, workflow technology is one of the fields developing most rapidly. Workflow system is the most important foundation of business process. The main target of workflow system is the automation of procedures where documents, information or tasks are passed between participants according to a predefined set of rules to achieve an overall business goal.Distribution, Heterogeneity and autonomy of modern enterprise's information become more and more remarkable with the fast development of IT technology and enterprise's globalization. On this objective background, the distributed workflow system, that supports distributed computing and collaboration among departments or enterprises, becomes the focus and future trend of workflow technology study. But most of the distributed workflow management systems have made use of centered management system, namely in the distributed workflow execution, there is only one primary workflow engine in charge of controlling and cooperating the subordinate workflow engines. As a result of some time problems within the workflow system not settled, the area of its description is limited.So, under the analysis of former distributed workflow technology, we bring forward a distributed workflow system based on Extended-ECA rule and event-driven mechanism, and it completes tasks in workflow by Extended-ECA rules of the workflow engines. First of all, extended ECA rule which extends in time, resolves the problems of ECA rule's deficient in describing complex process related to time, and rewriting the event into the occurrence time of the event makes the event expression have more expression semantics; define the workflow process by UML activity diagram, and add model elements to activity diagram, enlarge the describing ability of workflow model. This technology is applied in Container Logistics Information System, and the implementation of a process instance is also described.