Workflow Process Definition Reuse Problem

Workflow Management technology is considered as a key technology to provide powerful support to business process re-engineering, process management and process automatization. Defining a workflow is a process which transforms the business process into a computerized representation. It is one of the most important research fields in workflow study. The definition of workflow not only need to describe the activities in the business process and the relationships among these activities explicitly, but also need to involve other matters, such as allocation of resources consumed by the activity, defining data that transferred among the activities, allocation of application to execute activities, and so on. The business processes cannot be described perfectly unless they can be viewed from different aspects completely. So defining a workflow is time consuming and difficult work.This thesis focuses on the problem of how to reuse in defining a workflow. A process definition method based on reuse is proposed. This method takes advantage of the experience and knowledge gained by designers over time in order to avoid designing workflow from scratch. This method can reduce the complexity of defining a workflow. As a result, the quality of process definition is improved.The primary works and contributions in this thesis are listed as the following:1. The domain business ontology is proposed to share common business knowledge of special domain. The domain business ontology can help the developer understand the business knowledge and capture the business requirement. It is reusable asset of concept level.2. The idea of workflow template is inherited. Workflow template is defined explicitly in this thesis. Furthermore, some relative problems, such as the relationship among workflow templates, the store of workflow, and so on, are discussed. A workflow template is a standard design of a common business process. It is reusable asset of implement level.3. The semantic descriptions can be added to workflow template by applyingdomain business ontology into describing it. A workflow template retrieval method based on the domain business ontology is introduced.4. Some key processes are illustrated, including building the domain business ontology, producing workflow template and defining the workflow which is based on reusable assets.Based on the theoretical research, a process definition tool based on reuse, named PDTBR, is developed. We demonstrate its validity via an example.