The Design And Implementation Of The Business Rule-Based Workflow Task Assignment System

Task assignment of WfMS allocates tasks which are separately defined in workflows to appropriate executors. It is one of the most important functions of WfMS. Whether the task assignment is reasonable or not will affect the using efficiency of the business manpower and the business process efficiency.The contents of task assignment are complex and changing quickly.In one side,task assignment is associated with business workflow and organization information very much.In the other side,the competition of the market decides that task assignment is the most variational part of WfMS.Business decision-makers should take part in task assignments directly.But,existing task assignment solutions of WfMS can not satisfy the complex and changing requirements of companies.As business rule has strong expressive ability and is very easy to be understood and maintained,we design and implement a workflow task assignment system basing on the Drools.Basing on the systematic and deep researches on task assignment rules in WfMS,we provide an integrately formal task assignment rule definition.It provides a particular solution describing business task assignment rules. With introducing the concepts of rule template to solve the problems that normal business person cann't program and implement complex assignment rules.The implementation of the business rule-based task assignment system includes three modules:rule editor,rule compiler and the interface module between the rule engine and the workflow engine.Business person can use rule templates to edit task assignment rules easily. Rule compiler translates the business rules into rules that can be executed directly by Drools. Through the interface module, the rule engine can interact with the workflow engine to finish assigning real tasks.Comparing with the similar researches, the business rule-based task assignment method is not only has strong expressive ability, but also is easy to be used.It changes automatically with the changing requirements which improves the agility and usability of the WfMS.