An Event-Based Model for Workflow Management Systems

摘要

Nowadays, workflow management systems constitute some of the most powerful environments that enable collaborative computations to automate work processes. A complete business task performed by such systems usually requires cooperation fo several applications, among which there may be legacy systems. In this paper, we propose an event-based model for workflow management systems. The model consists of two inter-related levels, i.e., legacy system modeling level and interaction modeling level. These two levels are linked together to ensure the correct execuiton of a collaborative task. With the model, a legacy system is treated as an autonomous functional unit that responds to certain input events and produces corresponding output events. Each event is associated with one or more data objects. The interaction among legacy systems is modeled by the connection between input events and output events with certain data conversion facilities and time constraints.