WfMS:工作流管理系统

工作流管理系统的主要目标是通过合理地调用和配有关的信息及人力资源来协调业务过程中的各个活动，以促使业务目标的高效实现。在计算机和网络使用得越来越广泛的今天，工作流管理系统正在吸引起自研究机构及产业界越来越多的关流。本文对工作流管理系统的研究现状了了一个总结，详细介绍同工作流有关概念，分类，工作流管理联盟关于工作流管理系统的参考模型及以及当前的一些研究热点与发展趋势。

WFMS:WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Workflow management systems aim to help business goals to be achieved with high efficiency by means of sequencing work activities and invoking appropriate human and/or information resources associated with these activities. As computer networks are used more and more widely in daily work, workflow management attracts more and more attention from both industry and research communities. This paper summarizes the state of art in WfMS research. First some workflow related concepts and its typologies are described, followed by the Workflow Reference Model proposed by Workflow Management Coalition which provides a framework for workflow research and development. As the demand for enterprise wide, large scale, mission critical, complex workflow management increases, Workflow Management Systems must provide much higher level of flexibility, availability, scalability, reliability and interoperability. To achieve these goals, current research tries to provide more flexible workflow models, make WfMSs more object oriented and intelligent, support synchronous cooperation and mobile users, build WfMSs on the World Wide Web, distribute workflow enactment among multiple workflow engines, provide transaction control in workflow instance execution, and interconnect heterogeneous WfMSs. The importance of these aspects to workflow management, strategies adopted to overcome these difficulties are then analyzed in detail.