A Study On Workflow Management System For Virtual Distribution Center In HAD Environment

Today, enterprises are facing global competition and fluctuating market conditions. Virtual Enterprise is an emerging paradigm which results from the rapidly changing business environment, just as Virtual Distribution Center(VDC), which can be achieved after successful cross-organizational service oriented re-engineering, by which scattered logistics resources in our society will be made full use of and the competitive ability of our small and medium logistics enterprises will be enhanced.The building of cross-organizational workflow management system is a good way for managing, coordinating and controlling the activities of Virtual Distribution Center in HAD environment. Cross-organizational workflow management system can provide a strong support for the implementation of the distribution processes in VDC. It is the crucial supporting system for the operating of Virtual Distribution Center.Firstly, based on cross-organizational business process re-engineering theory and applying cross-organizational workflow technology, the cross-organizational distributed workflow model of Virtual Distribution Center is given. Secondly, efforts are made to explore the workflow management system architecture, interoperation mode and system integration method. Thirdly, a workflow management system prototype for VDC (VDCWfMS, Virtual Distribution Center Workflow Management System) on the basis of the emerging information technology (Java, XML, web service, MySQL...) and MVC development mode is described in detail.In the finality, the problems requiring further studies are discussed.