Research Of Workflow Management System Based On Transaction Processing

With the wide application of computer and network, workflow technology has become more and more important in the daily business processes. as the software carrier of workflow technology, workflow management system's main intention is the automation of business processes by calling the information resources and human resources to coordinate all aspects of business processes and make them executing according to a predefined set of rules.WfMS (Workflow Management System)often run in heterogeneous, autonomous and distributed environment Therefore, the correctness and reliability of WfMS is of critical importance to workflow system and becomes one of the major causes of the success or failure of the entire application. So the workflow system should have good ability of supporting transaction to ensure the system's correctness and reliability.The concept of Transaction was come from the research field of database management systems, adopting the data-centric approach, aiming at ensuring data consistency. Pulling-in the transaction characteristic in the workflow system is a hot research point in the workflow research field in recent years. The research of the thesis starts that is how to apply the transaction process characteristic into workflow management system, to solve the workflow issues in the long transaction, timely release of system resources, and improve the data consistency.The thesis analyses the differences between the transaction in WfMS and traditional transaction,advanced transaction. Based on the analysis, the thesis concludes what is the most important and difficult problem in the transaction processing in WfMS. With the conclusion, a WfMS concept model with transaction feature is proposed. In the model, the long transactions are split, the concept of compensation sub-transaction and empty compensation sub-transaction are added. and the rules for transaction recovery to guarantee the workflow processes' correction and consistency are proposed.Based on these reserches, the model, the storage mode of Long transaction and Sub-transaction,and a transction manager are designed and analyzed in detail. A complete workflow management system is developed. An example, the flow Textbook Change is used to analyze the effect of this model.