Research On Distributed Workflow System Oriented Enterprise Model

In order to make rapid response to market demands and enhance the competition ability in this information age, enterprises have to pay more attention to process-centric management. As a key technology in process integration, process automation and business process re-engineering in modern enterprises, workflow technology has become a hot topic in this field for some time. And its most important application is in the industrial field, especially in the manufacturing field. For satisfying the demand of multi enterprise collaboration in modern manufacturing industry, business processes cooperating among multi enterprises oriented distributed workflow management system is studied in this paper.As the base of the workflow management system, workflow modeling method is one of the core problems in the area of workflow technology. To support this distributed workflow management system, it's necessary to build the workflow model for enterprise business processes. This paper analyses the modeling ability and feature of the UML and brings forward a kind of workflow modeling method based on extended UML Activity diagram for abstracting the business process of the enterprise. To combine with other workflow, the process definition language, known as XPDL which was presented by WfMC, is modified and expanded. And XML Schema is used to describe the workflow model.To enhance the whole performance of the running workflow management system, on the basis of designing the structure of the distributed workflow engines and introducing the functions of each module, collaborative executing process among each workflow engine is advanced, which has solved the control problem of processes execution when the workflow management system is running. Meanwhile the scheduling strategy for workflow instances is studied. To reduce the resource competition among workflow instances, improve the usage of resources and make sure the workflow management system executes smoothly, three methods are given: heuristic rule based method, locking strategy and generation-ant hybrid task algorithm based method. Finally, on the basis of the application environment analysis, a distributed workflow prototype system based B/S has been designed and developed by J2EE to verify the theory research results in this paper.