Design And Implementation Of SOA Based Workflow Engine

With the development of WfMS, the cooperativity of process, recomposition of process and reusability of process models are realized between the enterprises and the enterprise itself. For the descriptions of business process is used as system input, and the implementation of flow instance is managed by this description, it has the advantages of good flexibility. As the background core of WfMS, the workflow engine is becoming key to designing and realizing the system. With the rapid development of Internet technologies in electronic business, the current applications of enterprise are becoming more and more distributed and heterogeneous, and then the traditional WfMS is unable to satisfy the requirements of application. Therefore, it is important to research how WfMS adapt to the changeful enterprise application environment.For the characteristics of low coupling service, transparent location, independent protocols, the above problems can be resolved by SOA technology. As the business process is converted to group of repetitive changeable services, the heterogenous services realized by different technologies which deployed broadly can be accessed through the Internet by standard interfaces. With the SOA technology, the adaptability of WFMS to distributed, heterogenous and dynamic application environment and the performance of system can be improved. With the characteristics of XML based structure and SOAP based communication protocol, Web Service technology is becoming one of the realizations of SOA. With the application of Web Service technology, the definition and realization of workflow become very convenient. The WfMS based on Web Service, especially the key technologies of workflow engine based on SOA are studied in this dissertation, and the main contributions of this paper are as following:1. Based on the theory and technology framework of workflow, the characteristics of workflow technology and the theory of SOA technology are analyzed. The applications of SOA technologies such as Web Service and BPEL4WS in WFMS are studied.2. The workflow management model based on SOA is discussed. With the analysis of the application of BPEL4WS in dynamic workflow flow definition, a structure model of workflow engine based on SOA named SWFE is proposed, the definition of partner link in this model are divided to static and dynamic bindings, which improves flexibility of the business flow and optimizes the system flow.3. In the development of a business trip management system base on B2B, with the use of SWFE, the dynamic workflow of system is abstracted, and the system workflow engine is designed and implemented. This makes the system keep high clustering and low coupling, and the scalability and maintainability of the system are enhances, which also makes the system satisfy the requirement of application well.