Research On Modeling Of Workflow In Distributed Work Environment

With the development of economic globalization and information networked, distributed collaborative work environment is the inevitable choice of government agencies and enterprises. Currently, workflow management technology, which can model, optimize and accomplish business processes, offer a suitable solution for group collaborative process reengineering. Building a workflow model which can describe process formally and be treated by computer is a key factor to the use of workflow management in government agencies and enterprises. Due to the features of collaborative work, community, dynamicity and distribution, in distributed environment, workflow model should be able to describe the characteristics of the distributed work environment.The collaborated workflow model under distributed environment, needs not only to express the relationship of activities but also needs to define the conveyed information, activities and resources which required for activities and to describe the closely dependency relationship of them. Meanwhile, the collaborative work provided with nested cooperative relations in distributed environment need to establish effective control mechanisms. Despite of the tremendous progress in the research of workflow modeling, the modeling of collaborative workflow, under distributed environment, is still a challenging research topic. The aim of this paper is to establish a workflow model suitable for the feature of cooperative work, which can describe the modeling of workflow lucidly.Firstly, based on the deep research of the theory of computer supporting cooperative work and workflow, the new demands of cooperative works in distributed environment for workflow modeling are analyzed. Under distributed environment, the management of member and resource should be enhanced in order to describe a variety of task types, support nested hierarchical cooperation relation and reflect the strong dependent relationship of them.Secondly, based on the meat-model proposed by Workflow Management Coalition, a new kind of workflow model, supporting collaborative work groups in distributed environment, is introduced. The model is composed of organizational model, resource model, task model and process model. The relationship of nested hierarchical cooperation relations between them are described in the same time.Thirdly, it has defined the basic cooperation unit possessing the autonomy cooperation characteristics-Cooperative unit, which directs at the characteristic of the nested hierarchical cooperation relation. It constructed the organization model, resource model, task model and process model which described through Petri nets. On the basis of the six process logic proposed by workflow management coalition, the logic relations of the course are expanded in this paper to support the cooperative work better.Finally, taking the united examination and approval for the construction project of a certain city as an example to verify the model, the modeling method of Cooperative unit is adopted to establish the model, which verified the validity of the above model.