Study on a flexible workflow technology and its application

The workflow technology has been widely used in enterprise business process management and developed very fast. Its main characteristic is to enable the process automation, which can coordinate persons or persons and application tools in order to complete a particular work. A flexible workflow technology is studied in this paper. Based on XML, a visual process definition tool is realized. According to the Petri-net model, workflow model was described and analyzed in detail. The flow engine design method was proposed and then realized. XML is a meta-markup language, which can separate data from display format. Because of its superior characteristics such as robustness, self-description, expandability and easy use, XML is very suitable for this technology. By using the visual process definition tool, even non-professionals can define the desired process and modify it easily. Petri net both has rigorous mathematical formulation and has intuitive graphical expression. It not only has rich systematical description means and systematical behavior analysis technology, but also can provide a solid conceptual foundation for computer science. As a model of describing asynchronous and concurrent system, Petri net is one of main modeling techniques. The flexible workflow technology which can greatly support embranchment and parallel was proposed in this paper. When unexpected event happened, it is very convenient to control and adjust the flow without interrupting the execution, and therefore, it demonstrates a great flexibility of selectivity and adaptability. The technology also can be conveniently embedded into the web project which has greatly facilitated the project development. In this paper, the example of stuff demission is used to illustrate the application of this workflow.