The Design Of A Workflow Engine Based On XPDL

The workflow management technology emerges as a result of the competition of enterprises and the development of the management and information technology. The workflow management system separates processes from the specific business. Serving to the specific business while devoting itself in the management of processes, it improves the enterprises in many aspects, such as the operational efficiency, use of resources, flexibility and adaptability etc.The development of the SMES Operation Management (OPM) was finished at the beginning of 2010 and was online for trial run at the end of the same year. Now, the SMES OPM has already been deployed and runs smoothly at 3 branches of Sinopec, which are Shijiazhuang, Yanshan and Qingdao. In OPM, many modules, such as Engineering Card Management, Operation Instruction Management, Operation Log and Tech & Engineering Month Report, depend on the workflow components for business processes.In this paper, the design and development of SMES workflow component is introduced. And this paper is organized as follows:The popular standards of workflow are introduced and some workflow systems/products are compared;As the basement of SMES OPM workflow component, XPDL standard is introduced;The overall and preliminary design work are introduced. Firstly, the architecture, technic roadmap, development platform and deployment environment are described briefly. Secondly, more importance are put on the description of the design of the workflow engine, permission system and dynamic form system. Thirdly, the domain model, database structure, main business process are represented.The software implementation and UI design are not covered in this paper.