What is Workflow Management?

Workflow management is a widely used and rapidly developing technology in the industry. Its main feature is to automate the process and to coordinate the work between people and various application tools to complete a certain task. The goal is for the right person or software to do the right job at the right time.

Workflow management

Right!

Workflow management is a widely used and rapidly developing technology in the industry. Its main feature is to automate the process and to coordinate the work between people and various application tools to complete a certain task. The goal is for the right person or software to do the right job at the right time.

Chinese name

Workflow management

Function

Automate the process

Types of

management

Related

jobs

The history of workflow technology dates back to the late 1970s

As an emerging research field, workflow management naturally has many problems that need to be further studied and resolved. By analyzing the workflow system, we summarize two main deficiencies: (1) the definition of workflow management is not clear and it lacks a unified Conceptual model; (2) system structure and capability deficiency of workflow management system.

1. Ambiguous definition of workflow management and lack of a unified conceptual model

The development of workflow management is very similar to the development of database management systems before the emergence of relational data models and E-R models in the early 1970s. Everyone has their own opinions. There is no unified standard. Most of the products developed are not mutually related. Compatibility makes many users unwilling to use commercial workflow management products.

Although WfMC is in workflow concepts and interfaces

The development of workflow management is to solve existing problems. To better meet user needs, because the workflow management system is mainly composed of workflow modeling and workflow implementation environment, the development trend of the workflow management system can also be examined separately from these two aspects.

1. The development trend of workflow modeling

Workflow modeling technology is far from mature, and it is still in an era of controversy. We conducted an inductive analysis of the mainstream modeling methods that have appeared in the current process modeling field, with a view to determining a reasonable direction for our research. Through inductive analysis, they can be divided into five categories: scripting languages, web-based methods, rule-based methods, logic-based methods, and algebraic methods.

(1) Script Language

The scripting language has a statement structure describing control flow and data flow. It provides a concise description method, which is easier for experienced designers to use. Its main disadvantage is the lack of formal semantics of the process itself, and the semantics of the language is mainly used by the language interpreter.

(2) Web-based method

It is suitable for the visual modeling of the process. Generally, the state transition network is used. The activities in the process are represented by nodes, and the control flow is represented by edges. The main problem of using the state transition network is whether there is formal semantics. Most of the visual modeling methods of workflow products lack formal semantics. Among the state transition networks with formal semantics, the most commonly used are Petr nets and State Charts. Web-based methods with formal semantics can be transformed into other modeling methods, such as rule-based, temporal logic, and scripting language methods.

(3) Rule-based method

The rule-based method that has been researched the most is the ECA (Event / Condltion / Acton, EcA for short) rule. The ECA rule was early used in AO0DBS and then used in the field of workflow management. ECA rules have a formal foundation and can also be transformed into other modeling methods. Such as Petri nets, sequential logic, etc., but the visualization workload of ECA rules is relatively large. In addition, it is difficult to manage if the rule set is large.

(4) Logic-based method

The logic-based method is suitable for describing the dynamics of the system. Among them, temporal logic is a commonly used method. It has a good formal foundation and it is convenient to verify the attributes of the workflow model. But the main disadvantage of sequential logic is that it is difficult to realize visualization. It is not easy to translate into other description methods, and the system behavior describing business processes is too complicated.

(5) Algebra-based method

Process algebra (Proees Algebra) is mainly limited to theoretical discussions and is rarely used in the field of workflow management. Only a description language based on process algebra, LOTOS, is used in the field of workflow management. The main disadvantages of algebraic methods are similar to logic-based methods, and they perform worse than logic-based methods in terms of automatic execution and formal verification. Modeling methods lack intuitiveness and are difficult to understand.

According to the above comparison, it can be seen that each modeling method has advantages and disadvantages. But overall, scripting languages, web-based methods, and rule-based methods are more attractive.

2. Development Trend of Workflow Implementation Environment

Workflow management systems should support the integration and interoperability of application systems in heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed environments, provide a way to integrate previous application systems to protect past investments, and be able to support the reorganization of organizations and support today The technology related to Dynamic Enterprise has certain fault tolerance, and the workflow management system can ensure the correctness and reliability of workflow execution when errors occur.

With the popularity of the Internet, some web-based workflow solutions have emerged. By observing the current commercialized Web-based workflow management system, it is shown that most products can only partially use the Web, but the development trend is more and more using the Web-oriented, this trend can be studied in some studies Reflected in the project, such as WebFlo, OzWeb, DartFlow, etc. However, due to the limitations of the Web and the browser itself, only the client / server computing mode can be provided, and the CGI interface used has only limited programming capabilities, and needs to be further improved in terms of location transparency, support for transaction functions, security, and performance. improve.

In addition, workflow research is a multi-disciplinary research involving CSCW, human-computer interaction, database, management, sociology and other disciplines. Any research that lacks multi-disciplinary cooperation will prevent the workflow management system from becoming a universal system, resulting in functional deficiencies.