The Process Of Inheritance Workflow

Workflow Management technology is considered as the core technology to provide powerful support to business process re-engineering, process management and process automatization. Process modeling is a process in which designers completely define the process definition by way of the process definition tool, and transfer the definition information into the standard format which workflow engines could recognize. As the basis of the theory research and practical application of workflow technology, the ability of a workflow model directly decide whether process designers could accurately produce process definitions in less time. Therefore, it could make a direct effect on the efficiency of enterprise process. In a word, a good workflow model is a key factor to develop a workflow management system with high flexibility, reliability, retractility, and inter-operability.In order to solve the problems of poor description ability and process definition reusability existed in existing workflow management system, in this paper, a new workflow modeling method based on process inheritance is put forward. The method proposes a new modeling mechanism by introducing inheritance mechanism of object-oriented method into it. The related definitions and regulations of workflow process inheritance and the corresponding workflow model structure are given in this paper. The detailed mechanisms and steps of dynamic modification based on process inheritance are also presented in this paper. Compared with traditional workflow modeling methods, the proposed method has significant advantages in enhancing process definition reusability, reducing complexity, and improving system flexibility and adaptability. The proposed method has important value in improving the efficiency of modeling method and enhancing description ability.The main work and achievements of this thesis are as follows:1. By use of inheritance in object-oriented programming, the inheritance relationship between different process definitions is defined as three types according to the inheritance degree. Moreover, the corresponding implementations andmessage-lookup mechanism are further proposed. This paper also discussed how to avoid the possible problems and semantic confusion of multiple inheritance.2. On the purpose of applying concepts and theories related process inheritance into workflow model, we designed and developed the workflow management system prototype based on process inheritance on three dimensions including process meta-model, model definition language, and the dynamic model of runtime system.3. After analyzing the existed achievements of dynamic modification, we proposed two practical methods-process instance transfer and dynamic bind sub-process activity—both of which are based on process inheritance, to improve the flexibility of workflow management system.4. This paper also discussed many practical problems referring to the maintenance of process definitions. Under the framework of workflow model based on process inheritance, we put forward a method which could greatly facilitate the system administrator and effectively improve the efficiency of maintenance.At the end of this thesis, a workflow management system prototype based on upward theory is developed. The practical use of this system proves the feasibility and validity of research achievements in this paper. This article wishes all achievements have positive effect on the researching on the mechanism of process inheritance in WfMS.