Support The Dynamic Evolution Of The Design Of The Workflow System

Considering the collaboration and efficiency society, workflow technology can improve the enterprises and structure's efficiency and enlarge the scale of collaboration. All the people have praised it when it first showed up. But when enterprises depend more and more on this technology and system's administration, they have to face the embarrassment of its lacking flexibility and adaptability. Because of the multiplicity of uses or scenarios, it cannot be possible to consider all the possibility. So how to make the workflow system have more adaptability and flexibility is the hottest subject of research.In this paper, it was based on front/back end definition of the micro-workflow architecture, to fulfill the need of workflow system's dynamic evolution, took out all the problem maybe caused by dynamic evolution and improved the system structure. Then designed the workflow system supporting dynamic evolution. According to the analysis and research of the dynamic evolution, the system must properly manage the different versions and support all the propagation policy and ensure the correctness of workflow type and instances same before the evolution and after. To deal with the dynamic the problem of the evolution the workflow type should be solved first. To ensure the definition all the same, the granularity of versioning should not be changed, and still kept as the whole workflow. The definition of workflow type version is defined. When a workflow type is modified, there will be a new one and not was directly changed.In order to versioning the problem of that how the old one could be changed to fit for the new version must be solved, which is also called migration. We solved this problem by the definitions of workflow front/back end, and did not take the way of all over the history event of this instance, but take the way of justifying whether there is or not a correct condition after the instance was migrated. And the result is that efficiency is improved.To make the workflow evolution support all the propagation policies, the rebounding should be involved. It means that some part of instances could berebounded with the new workflow version. If a local modification is necessary, a variant should be rebounded with the instance.Having solved the management of different versions, propagation policies and the correctness problem, according the module and definitions that have been stated, a set of components, which support evolution, could be designed. It contains workflow version manager, migration manager and evolution manger. They can communicate with the interfaces. Now they do support the dynamic evolution.At last a new workflow system of office automation system, which can handle the procedure of files, works right. It has all the property of supporting dynamic evolution. And the uses are satisfied.