A Research On The Conflicts Of Resources Among Concurrent Processes In Workflow

Recently workflow management is one of technologies that are developing quickly in computer application field, and is coming to a hot spot of research in IT. Its characteristic is the automation of business process and coordination between persons or persons and application tools in order to assign the suitable persons and software to the right activity at the right time. When a workflow is running, activities usually compete for the same exclusive resources, which results in resource conflicts; hence workflow engine can not correctly schedule these resources. Therefore potential resource conflicts should be inspected and removed from workflow model before workflow is running.Resource conflicts are formulated into two categories in workflow systems:(1)Resource conflicts between activities that are performed at the same time in a single process.(2)Resource conflicts between activities that are concurrently performed in different processes.Today people have researched much on the first category of resource conflicts, while little attention has been paid to the research of the second category. However with the rapidly development of network and communication technology, the business processes in enterprises are exhibiting the property of distribution. There is always a problem competing for limited and shared resources among concurrent processes in these enterprises. So it is of great importance to solve the conflicts of resources among multi-processes. In this paper, we probe into the problem of resource conflicts among concurrent processes in workflow. And the main researchwork and achievements include:1. By introducing the concept of resource and priority level based on timed workflow net model (TWF-net), this paper presents an extended TWF-net and redefines its characters. With time mapping function related to time zones, extended TWF-net can characterize workflows distributed in multi-time zones, and we present a method to resolve the resources conflicts among concurrent processes.2. An algorithm that can check resource conflicts is proposed based on extended TWF-net. At built-time the algorithm can determine whether there are potential resource conflicts among activities in extended TWF-net. This algorithm can inspect both resource conflicts in single process and the conflicts among concurrent processes.3. We give a parallel business processes case in a distributed enterprise. The concurrent processes are modeled into an extended TWF-net by the presented method, which can resolve the resources conflicts among concurrent processes. And we demonstrate performance of the concurrent processes.