Lightweight Workflow Engine Research And Design

With the development of network information technology, people want to take advantage of computer network technology to manage business process which dispersed in time and geographic so as to a unified monitoring, execution and analysis, thus, achieve the specification and meticulous management, cost-saving purposes. This is called workflow technology. Any IT system taking workflow technology could be called workflow management system. Currently, workflow technology has been widely implemented in variety of IT system such as OA、ERP、CRM、PDM and so on. The workflow engine is the core of the workflow management system, the main work of developing a workflow management system is actually to develop a workflow engine. It’s means that developping a lightweight general-purpose workflow engine can quickly build an information management system with workflow management capabilities, not only can improve the robustness and flexibility of the workflow management software, but also reduces the development cost and risk of software development organizations.So, we try to proposed a Generic workflow engine by researching and improving the theory of workflow engine.The universality determined the engine can not be related to any business, can not do any special application scenario assumes. Therefore, we propose the principle of lightweight design that engine only need to implement the necessary functionality, but more than the pursuit of a complex structure, focus on improving the flexibility of the engine and the independence and efficiency of the above. Found in the literature review and analysis of a large number of well-known workflow products based on workflow technology theory, there are many defects, mainly in:1) lacking accepted ideal modeling method.2) The fact that workflow task allocation method is not good enough to constraint task distribution efficiency.3) difficult to combined with normalization and flexibility. The theoretical defects can not be completely hinder the development of the product, but could led to the disadvantages of the product such as heterogeneous and core functionality vulnerable, In view of this fact and take our design goals and principles into consideration, starting from the theory and design specifications, detailed innovation and improvement of the engine core functions, mainly contains the following work: 1. Fully complied WMFC workflow engine meta-models structure rules and the use of standard XBPL process template file description language, enhanced the engine specifications and interactive.2. Build a new modeling method by improving workflow net, which is derived from Petri net and greatly close to the ideal modeling method for it’s advantages such as formal definition, graphical representation,hierarchical modeling,suit for verification analysis and flexibility.3. Based on the modeling approach, we proposed a validation algorithm based on standardized model to ensure the correctness and rationality of the model.4. Proposed a new workflow task allocation algorithm based on triangular fuzzy number. Good performance of the algorithm is verified by experiment simulation, laid the foundation for the design of high-performance tasks distributor.5. Detailed analysis and design of the structure of the engine and the detail design of route scheduling algorithm, to further ensure the flexibility of the engine.Theoretical improvements laid a solid theoretical foundation for the development of a good workflow engine. Further more,Developing a lightweight workflow engine based on Microsoft Visual Studio.net platform and related developing technology, the engine actually be a middleware which imbedded in workflow management information system, helping developers save a lot of time and manpower costs.