Web-based Distributed Work Flow Execution System

Workflow technology is the core technology for the enterprises to model, simulate, analyze, manage and integrate their business processes. It can streamline the business process, and improve the competitiveness of the enterprises.The workflow management system is a software system which works out the workflow definition and manages the execution of the workflow instance, its runtime architecture can be centralized or distributed. This paper concentrates on the systematic structure and execution technology of the workflow management system, and proposes a distributed Web-based structure which combines the centralized and the distributed. And this structure is mainly composed of the visual modeling tool, the controlling site and the executing site and so on, of which the former makes visual modeling for the business process of enterprises, and keeps it in the process definition depository in XML format; and the sites build the runtime environment for the workflow instance to form a network architecture of B/S. The controlling site is made up of function modules such as the workflow manager, the site parser and the model partitioner, and the executing site consists of the task scheduler, the task manager, etc. According to the above mentioned, the paper makes further analysis on different functions and illustrates the collaboration between these function modules.In the end, according to this architecture, a prototype system is developed, which utilizes the object-oriented technology in Java programming language; the system is illustrated by a practice case.