Design And Implementation Of Distributed Workflow Management System

The workflow management system (WfMS) is a new type of information system which allows the business enterprise to control the business processes agilely. What the WfMS controls is the business process depicted by the workflow process definition. Along with the development of BPM and the expansion of BPR, someone thinks that the WfMS would be the same important as the RDBMS in the future, and it would be the infrastructure of the enterprise information platform. Currently, the domestic development of workflow management techniques is at the early level. The existing WfMSs are almost single engine centralized and multi engines centralized. Because of the limitation of the performance, these centralized WfMSs are not able to fully support the management of the business processes of the big and medium-sized business enterprises. Therefore, to enhance the domestic competitive ability in the WfMS market and to provide the high-qualitative infrastructure of the domestic electronic governmental business, it has the big scientific research value and social performance that studying and building the distributed WfMS based upon various distributed computing techniques and the workflow management theories. This thesis mainly introduces the design and implementation of the distributed WfMS. Under the direction of my Director, Prof. Zhou Mingtian, I took part in this project at Sansoft Technology Company in Peking. During the period of designing, we studied various Petri-net based workflow modeling technologies and many different workflow models including the WfMC's workflow reference model, and the WfMS we designed provides the five standard interfaces of the reference model. To allow the system to be independent on the underlying OS platforms, we choose JAVA as the implementation technique, and use RMI distributed computing mechanism to realize the cooperation of the different workflow engines. To realize the WfMS's compatibility and cooperation with other business application systems, the underlying communication components layer of the WfMS we designed can provide several remote call interfaces based upon many distributed communication protocols such as CORBA, RMI, Web Service, Message, and so on. To support Web-based workflow application, the modeling tool of the WfMS we designed provides the process forms. Based upon the XML template technology and Template pattern programming technology, the process form not only is propitious to the rapid development of the Web-based workflow application, but also can resolve the problem that the...