Visual Workflow Modeling Tool And Its Implementation

Workflow Management technology is considered as the core technology to provide powerful support to business process re-engineering, process management and process automatization. The basic requirement for workflow modeling is that the processes are modeled in a simple and virtual way. So actual business process can be expressed by computer. In this paper, a workflow meta-model is proposed, and a formal process definition based on XML is also presented. Based on this model, a visual workflow modeling tool is designed.The workflow meta-model consists of three components, namely: process model, organization model and resource model. In order to describe business processes from different viewpoint, process model is constructed by three kinds of objects, i.e., task logic, process logic and beginning/ending logic. Task logic can be used to describe the types of activities; process logic is defined according to the relationship between activities; beginning/ending logic provides trigging mechanism for activities. Organization model and resource model are built based on object-oriented technology. The workflow modeling tool is developed in Java language; user can create business process and define the properties of activities in a natural and visual way. In this paper, we have discussed many advanced properties of activity, such as transaction processing, time management, access protection, event/action handling etc, which enhance the flexibility of workflow system. In order to control data flow in the business process, we proposed a new solution with variable-influence table to describe the routing of information. Moreover, the workflow modeling tool provides grammar verification for workflow model.The whole workflow model is defined by Extensible Markup Language (XML), which eliminate the barrier of data sharing between different workflow management systems. In order to standardize the XML description of process definition, we develop the DTD of the definition XML document to ensure the validation of the process definition.