The Temporal Constraints Of The Workflow Management Framework

With the rapid expansion of Internet and Intranet, some kinds of software systems have been greatly evolved, especially the Workflow Management System, WfMS. The main intension of WfMS is the automation of procedures where documents, information or tasks are passed between participants according to a predefined set of rules to achieve an overall business goal.There have been a lot of productions of WfMS nowadays. But in most of these productions, it is not allowed to change the workflow except in build time. The workflow's temporal dependences are defined statically in the process definition of the workflow model and after definition the model is steady. At present, the productions of WfMS have difficulties to deal with the dynamic changes of temporal dependences, this thesis focus on this topic and proposed the WTMA architecture for it.First, this thesis study the WfMS's reference model, the functions and standard of most parts of the reference model have been studied in depth. And then study the Petri Nets based modeling of workflow, temporal relation and temporal dependences of workflow. Based on the above research work, the WTMA architecture is introduced, WTMA can dynamic adjust the temporal dependence of the workflow and make the workflow run under control.The main contributions of this paper are as follows, first, WTMA, which stands for the Workflow Temporal Management Architecture, is proposed. Then describe it's principle, Its system architecture and its system prototype; Second, Describes the Policy Object which can encapsulates the temporal dependences rules, The policy object is based on the Object-Oriented Knowledge Representation model; Thirdly, analyze an workflow model instance and apply policy objects to Represent the temporal dependences of the instance.