The Research And Implementation Of Ontology Dynamic Workflow Rules Editor Based On YAWL

Nowadays, information technology has immerged deeply into every aspect of human society, and almost all the organizations, such as government, corporation, and other organizations, need information systems to support their business. Therefore, it is one of the major challenges to efficiently build information systems oriented to organizations. Among the technical options, workflow technology supports business process modeling, business process simulation, business Process Management and Integration, and thus is the core technology to achieve the business process automation. Workflow separates application logic and process logic. Without specific function modification, it can alter the system function by modifying the process model, and then realizes the integrated management of production business or all the processes, effectively organizes human, information and tools together, enhances to reuse the software, exerts system's full potential, and achieves what modern enterprises asks that appropriate information sent to the appropriate people at the appropriate time. However, with the development of society, the flexibility of organization is increasing, traditional rigid process is disappearing, and thus the workflow management system are required to deal with the flexible and dynamic organizations and business processes. This paper addresses on how to improve the flexibility, dynamic and scalability of work flow management system.The idea of this article comes from the full comparison of similar studies. On the basis of many research fruits, this paper is composed. By integrating ontology, Worklet and ripple down rules into workflow, a flexible and dynamic workflow management system can be established, with respective features.Conceptualized as the clear specification, ontology is conducive to the domain knowledge sharing, and thus can improve the scalability of the system constructed. With Ontology depiction Language OWL and based on the workflow process definition meta-model from Workflow Management Coalition, this paper establishes a consummate concept sets, including activities, roles, workflow relative data, called procedure, transition, controlled structure and condition. With the complete description of the work flow management system resources, the paper constructs a unified workflow platform for the operation.Worklet is a self-contained extensible sub-process definition. It depends on the context of specific cases of the workflow and can be used in many scenarios. By combining worklet, the system can greatly enhance the flexibility. Process modeling staff can thus address to the static and dynamic parts of the workflow separately, which simplify the model testing and provides a understandable workflow view. Worklet is different from decomposition or subnet performing specific task at runtime. Compared to subnet is assigned statically at design time, Worklet can be added to the system catalog at anytime of process life cycle, even at the execution time of workflow cases. Therefore, it is not necessary to define all the possible branches at design time, which allows the user to define a more concise process definition. For the unforeseen events, we can avoid the off-system modification, model reconstruction and other issues, with flexiblydefining worklets for the system.Ripple Down Rule is both an incremental knowledge acquisition technique and a kind of the rules representation. It allows rapid development of knowledge base by users or experts. For the reason RDR is chosen, not only the unique rule format which easily to add or refine rules, but our system is constructed based on ontology and RDR has sound attributes to combine with ontology, easily to construct domain knowledge base. By using ripple down rules, the system can flexibly associate different worklets defined, and thus greatly increase the flexibility of the system. After clear introduction of three important concepts above, the paper is constructed as follows. In chapter one, the backgrounds and research content of this paper is introduced. Specially, a detailed survey of current domestic and abroad research status is given, including commercial Workflow Management System, non-commercial systems as well as academic research results. Comparison and analysis of this paper to the above survey is also given. Workflow technology is described in the chapter two, including the depiction of workflow related concepts, comparison of different representative definitions from research institutions, detailed description of workflow model from Workflow Management Coalition, workflow management system and the current requirements for the system.The third chapter focuses on the YAWL, a workflow management system based on Petri Net. Petri Net is introduced at first, and its formal definition is also given, with the depiction of main advantages of using Petri Net to modeling working process. Then, workflow net is introduced. Finally, the YAWL system is highlighted, including workflow patterns, the reason YAWL was chosen and the architecture of YAWL system. In particular, a detailed introduction of the core of the system—the workflow engine is given, as well as its scheduling algorithm. Chapter four introduces the ontology relative knowledge. The definition and evolution of the concept is given at first. Then we introduce the formal representation of ontology. For the language, Web Ontology Language is emphasized. On this basis of these works, this chapter pays special attention on defining workflow process meta-model with ontology, and use OWL represent the meta-model.Chapter five is the key part of this paper, and we introduce the research and implementation process of ripple down rules editor here. Worklet and relative important concepts is depicted at first, including the dynamic selection service and dynamic exception service based on YAWL system. Then, the design principles and implementation process is given. Specially, for the exceptions in workflow, we summarize thirteen exception handling primitives, with which the user can define their exception handling process. In the last part of this chapter, how to carry out the development based on YAWL model editor is given, mainly about the integration of the editor developed above with YAWL system. Chapter six is about the conclusion and future work. A summary of the paper is given. The features extracted from the system are also depicted, as well as the work needed in future.In the research and implementation process of rules editor proposed, whatever the YAWL system architecture, workflow engine or the ontology depiction of workflow process definition meta-model are entirely based on the Workflow Management Coalition. In the process of developing rules editor, it does not depend on specific components, and the editor achieves theintegration with the YAWL system after its development. The editor package encapsulates well, and with the provided JAVA API, it can be conveniently integrated into other modeling tools based on rippled down rules, which facilitates universal adapt ion.With innovative combining ontology, Worklet and ripple down rules together and introduce into workflow domain, this paper establishes a relatively complete system architecture and operation patterns of dynamic workflow management system, which is flexible and extensible, and thus is a good reference for similar studies.