Design And Implementation Of The Temporal Workflow Engine Based On YAWL

Since the release of the Workflow Reference Model from Workflow Management Coalition(Wf MC), workflow technology came into a mature phase. It is considered as an effective solution of implementing business process management automation, therefore leads to a wide range of usages and researches in various fields. However, drastic competitions amongs enterprise and urgent needs for the government to improve their efficiency cause higher timeliness requirement for workflow productions. Currently, the domestic and international research on workflow related to timeliness is mostly focused on workflow basic theory like workflow language and workflow process modeling. As for workflow productions, time management is never implemented as a core module within workflow management systems, features and functions related to time management are usually implemented simply by performing timers on single task or case, which is far from satisfied.This thesis is proposed under the background of "research and demonstration based on public large-scale building energy monitoring and operation management system", which is supported by Science and Technology Major Projects of Guangdong province. The system is developed based on workflow technology, adopts the open source and service-oriented YAWL as workflow engine. The YAWL workflow system, which follows the Wf MC Workflow Reference Model and supports over 32 workflow controll patterns, is strongly extendable, providing a suitable platform for the design and implementation of the temporal workflow engine.This thesis aims to extend the open-sourced YAWL workflow engine, which takes the time management as a core module of the engine, implementing time constrains on both process, case and resource and thus satisfy the need of process timeliness. It’s main features includes: adding temporal properties to all theer dimentions of workflow as basic properties, not only additional properties; holding time constrains through the whole business process, not only some specific task; treating time constrains of all task as a whole constrain, not only individual constrains.This thesis goes through temporal workflow theory, workflow controll patterns, YAWL workflow engine and related interfaces, analyzes requirements for extending the YAWL language and extending YAWL workflow engine to support temporal workflow features under the guidance of software engineering theory. After outline design, detail design, coding and testing, YAWL language is extended to support temporal workflow features and a temporal workflow engine based on YAWL is implemented.