A Scalable and Dynamic Service Oriented Workflow Model

To improve the scalability and dynamism of current workflows, this paper presents a loosely coupled and modular service oriented workflow model, which is realized by enterprise service bus technology, a modular workflow enactment system and a run-time service matching policy. The model uses enterprise service bus to lower data dependency of different business service modules, the modular enactment system consists of many configurable and autonomous workflow enactment modules, over which the process scheduling logic is distributed, all of these make the model very scalable and reliable. In order to let an activity that requires services invocation have the ability to dynamically bind different services every time without modifying the designed process model, virtual activity is used in process modeling to represent it in this paper, the real service partner is matched and bound at run-time, compared with static service binding, this real-time service matching policy is more agile and reliable. Finally we use a case to further illustrate our proposed model.