Method for defining multiple homogeneous activities in distributed workflow management system

Yinzhou Zhu, Hui Yang, Baolin Yin

COMPUTER MODELLING & NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2014 18(1) 121-128

National Laboratory Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

In current process-oriented software systems, most of the processes have large number of parallel activities, which are homogeneous. These parallel activities are often used in the split-merge workflow structure and make the workflow model too complex to manage, as in the traditional workflow management systems each activity has to be defined respectively and bind to one resource. In this paper, we explore a novel method to define the distributed workflow model, which replaces the multiple homogeneous parallel activities with a batch-activity node to simplify the workflow model. An architecture is designed based on this method, which involves the model of organization structure, resource allocation and the sub-workflow. This architecture allows one batch-activity node bind to multiple resources, which are distributed, over a wide geographic area. Real-world scenarios, which are built and implemented based on this architecture, are shown to prove the effectiveness and usefulness of the method.