Component-oriented Model Of The Workflow Engine

At present, the development of work flow management system (WfMS) costs high because of the long development lifecycle and lower generality. Meanwhile, software maintenance costs much due to low standardization. To solve these issues, the paper proposes a new solution, component-oriented work flow engine model, called COWE model. COWE model encapsulates a work flow process as a component, and then a series of relevant components could be assembled into a composite component which is well functional and complicatedly structural. With the support from COWE, software developer could quickly build a WfMS, conveniently like Plug-and-Play by reusing available components. In this way, it could not only save time and fund, improve the development efficiency and avoid the duplicated work, but also develop a well-specified, more reliable product which requires lower maintenance cost. Therefore, it is meaningful for quickening the digitalization progress of the enterprise and improving the kernel competition capability.The article mainly research design, implement and performance testing of the COWE model. Main research of the paper is as following:1. The concept of work flow process component and the formal representation rule W-SC paradigm for work flow process component are proposed. The paradigm is verified by the work flow process component instance having the following advantages: capable in description, well structured and readable of the describing language.2. The architecture of the COWE model is designed. Using the work flow process component's executing in COWE as mainline, the functionality and structure of the model's eight modules and five exterior interfaces are depicted. A scheduling algorithm about executor's executing the segments is innovatively presented. The algorithm uses the FCFS (First Come First Served) strategy combined the preemption strategy with time-out and out-of-queue.3. The two means of the assembling of the work flow process component, reference assembling and combine assembling, are proposed. According to instances, the advantages and disadvantages of the two means of the assembling are analyzed.