Process Version Management And Process Template Evolution Based On Multi-Tenancy Workflow Customization

Software-as-a-service (SaaS), as a kind of cloud service mode, provides services to companies through the Internet. SaaS providers deploy the software on the own server, while the tenant rent the service according to their own need. Tenants can access the applications through the web portal. This mode reduce the cost of ISVs and the fees of small and medium-sized enterprises in buying software, building and maintaining infrastructure and applications。The application with workflow technology is also a part of SaaS. In a multi-tenant environment, for the same workflow, tenant’s demand is changeable, which leads to many problems:for the same process, different tenants have different requirements, and each tenant demand for the same process is often not immutable. If every time for tenant’s requirement change by the developers is needed to solve, the cost is too high. The method to solve the problem is customization. This can not only improve the flexibility of the application, and reduce the cost of workflow application.In the procedure of workflow customization. ISVs provides a template for each process. Each tenant gets a number of different versions through process customization. These versions are not identical, and each tenant can only access their own versions of the process. It’s necessary to manage the customized versions by each tenant to ensure the business systems running well. It’s also necessary to preserve the historical customized process to reflect the demand of tenants.When the customized information of tenants is enough, ISVs can evolve the template process file according to the customized information, which can make the acceptance of the template file higher. The aim of the evolution is reduce the number of custom operation when tenants use processes. The evolution makes the process template to be more familiar to the requirement of tenants as a wholeIn this paper, the main work is as follows:1. Proposed a process customization framework and a customizable workflow data model. The customization process based on the process data model to meet the personalized needs of users, realize the loose coupling of business and process, the loose coupling of processes and resources. This reduces the cost of SaaS applications and improves the flexibility of configuration and use of workflow in SaaS applications.2. Proposed a process for multi-tenant version management model based on the process customization architecture. The model uses a new process version management method to manage the customized process versions. It can also collect the information of historical customized process and new customized process versions. This guarantees the running of processes。3.A evolution method of process template is proposed. It evolves the process template according to the tenant’s custom data, which makes the acceptance of the template file higher and the customization operation less.