Research of Workflow Engine Modeling and Simulation Based on Colored Petri Nets

摘要

Workflow engine, the most essential and complex part in workflow management system, needs a good model to verify the correctness of its design before development. For now, most workflow engine models are established by the means of traditional software engineering. However, this method cannot dynamically simulate the behavior of engine at runtime, but only statically analyze the design of workflow engine. Therefore, the method cannot analyze the model quantitatively and verify the correctness of the model design. In order to solve this problem, a workflow engine modeling and simulation method based on colored Petri nets (CPN) is proposed in this paper. This method establishes a workflow engine net (WEN) to describe internal mechanisms of the engine and expresses worktlow processes with tokens and color multiset. The workflow engine model based on CPN can simulate the engine behavior dynamically at runtime. The efficiency of algorithm and data structure can be analyzed through the simulation result quantificationally. The workflow modeling and simulation based on CPN can verify the correctness of engine design and provide much more support for the engine development than traditional method.