The Research And Design Of Workflow Management System

With the continuous development of information technology, the organizations and firms begin to pay more attention to process control and management by computer technology. While the traditional software of process control is always customized for a single requirement with "hard-coded", which makes it difficult for the software maintenance and upgrade, the technology of workflow is developed, which can not only separate the business process and business data from application software and control data, but also can separate the business rules from business process. With this kind of technology, the software development could be accelerated, and the development risk may be decreased. Meanwhile it is able to integrate enterprise legacy system, and facilitates the management and process reengineering of the business. WfMS (Workflow Management System) is based on workflow technology. By transferring and distributing concerned information and resource reasonably to correspond each activity in business procedure, it can help realize business objects of enterprise efficiently and reform business procedure better.In this paper, the origin of the workflow, the research status of workflow management system at home and aboard, and the developing tendency of the workflow productions and their lacking were discussed. As the following, the related concept of workflow and workflow management system was introduced. The composition and the main function of the workflow management system, and the reference system model proposed by WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition) were explained in detail.According to the analysis of the background and the research of the theory, a workflow management system based on database and Struts was developed. A detail design of this system was shown including the architecture and the classification of functions. The workflow model was analyzed in detail. Under the theory of the directed graph and the strategy of the role-based access control, the workflow process and organization model of the system were proposed. After the related workflow data were classed, the structure of the database was designed. Particularly, the workflow engine was deeply discussed such as the structure of the workflow engine, the running principle and the rule of the status changing. The router and the condition-judgment algorithm were realized. The ways of task assignment and the log administration were introduced as well.Finally, an example of applying the system and the analysis of the performance were given in the paper.