Web Services-based Workflow Management System

Workflow management technology is an important computer technology in enterprise business process management. As the fast e-business development in Internet, traditional workflow management systems(WFMS) can't meet the requirement of modern business process management any more. They don't provide enough support to dynamic and inter-organization business processes because lacking agility and interoperability.Our solution is to introduce one of the latest technology-Web services to improve WFMS performance. Web services based on the service-oriented architecture framework provide a suitable technical foundation for making business processes accessible within enterprises and across enterprises. Published and discovered Web services through standard messages will add dynamic and interoperational features to WFMS.In this paper, we first introduce workflow and web services, then analyze the shortcomings of the traditional WFMS. In Chapter 4 we discuss web-service-based WFMS in three aspects: implementing activities in a process by web services and dynamically resolving service provider as participational role; how business processes are published as web services and workflow resources are shared; modeling inter-organization business processes by web services to improving WFMS interoperability. The other two major parts of this paper are web service description language(WSDL) specification on workflow definition and implementation details on web-service-based WFMS. Finally all of the works in this paper are summed up and their futures are prospected.