Research And Implementation Of Workflow Verification Based On State Transformation

With the development of network, more and more enterprises are using workflow technology to improve operation efficiency. Now Workflow technology has been accepted as the core technology in terms of workflow definition and management. Workflow management system is a software system that defines and manages workflow, including the following four sub-systems: workflow modeling tool, workflow engine, customer application and workflow management tool. Workflow modeling tool is in charge of the workflow process modeling and responsible for the verification of the model which has always been a hot issue.Only when verification is solved, can workflow have a better development.The paper analyzes the current situation and presents a conclusion of workflow verification methods.Workflow verification includes grammar, structure and semantic verification. This paper mainly focuses on structure verification.The key point is to detect all the structure conflicts to guarantee smooth execution of the workflow. The paper proposes a formal definition of workflow, activity state and rules how to transform the state. At this point, the execution of the workflow can be viewed as the transformation of the activities.Finally, through the set of activity state we know whether the model is well defined. We also make specfic analysis of typical anomalies in structure, deadlock, multi-instance, and infinite cycles.Then the paper presents the solutions of the state transformation-based method and makes a comparison with related methods. The method also works very well in dealing with cycle structure and overlapping structure.The paper develops a modeling tool, JXWfst, based on XML following the rules of WFMC. The general function of the tool is about modeling, modifying and verifying the workflow model. With a friendly interface, users can build a model flexibly. Structure modeling is also available with this tool for the purpose of modeling correctly and efficiently. The workflow model is saved as XPDL so that it can be shared on different worklfow platforms. JXWfst implements the state transformation-based method and through the analysis of company recruitment process, we know that this method can be used widely.