Enhancing Workflow Management in the Manufacturing Information System of a Small-Medium Enterprise: An Agent-Based Approach

One shortcoming of manufacturing information systems is their inability to integrate and to enhance different information and related functionalities, such as those found in workflow management. Software agents, once added as a new software layer to an existing system, can overcome this problem. Of the fields applying software agent technology, manufacturing, and especially workflow management, is perhaps the most promising for the development of distributed systems. This potential is reflected in the several ongoing research projects that focus on workflow management and share the final aim of integrating and coordinating plant and business activities.The approach presented in this paper can be regarded as an agent-based architecture applied to an existing workflow management system in order to manage new functionalities, e.g., customer relationship management in electronic commerce. This approach is particularly suitable for small medium enterprises with simple manufacturing information requirements and simple or nonexistent computer based workflow management.The model and some important features of system implementation, such as the knowledge modeling graphical user interface, the communication model, and a simple practical example of the architecture's use, are described.     

CIMS应用集成平台中基于代理机制的运控系统研究

在制造业ＣＩＭＳ应用集成平台的项目背影下，深入研究了其底层系统使能的运行管理与控制系统的体系结构及实施方案，结合目前国际上在软件代理及工作流方面的研究工作提出了ＣＩＭＳ分布环境下的运控系统的代理体系结构。     

Management of enterprise-wide systems integration programs

Automation and Information Systems play both tactical and strategic roles in the success of a business enterprise. They also pose an extremely challenging set of management issues concerned with the selection and management of technologies, management of the workforce to achieve successful implementation and operational use, and the integration of automation and information systems with business operations to capture the full benefits. Systems Integration programs involve high levels of technical and management risk commensurate with the significant business benefits that may be achieved. New and emerging automation and information technologies for Computer Integrated Manufacturing/Distribution, image processing, real-time transaction processing, and customer service cut across all organizational and functional units of an enterprise and require full system integration to capture their potential benefits. A wave of re-engineering programs are underway within commercial enterprises and the government to modify their business processes to take full competitive advantage of these technologies. There are numerous examples of both well managed and hopelessly mangled systems integration programs in both the public and private sectors that lead to the need for better management approaches. The management of software development has been a particularly troublesome area. This article presents a general model of the management structure to implement a systems integration program, using an enterprise-wide Information Systems Architecture (ISA) as a roadmap, and supported by a defined set of measures and metrics. Standards, although no panacea for systems integratio, play an important role in the architectural framework. The Information System Architecture approach described in this article is comprehensive in covering application software and data architecture as well as the computing and communications hardware infrastructure and other automation technologies that support the overall business process. The objective of the accompanying management model is to define a management structure, its essential functions, and methods that support a traditional systems development approach, as well as new approaches using prototyping and evolutionary development. Any of these management approaches require an ISA that is comprehensive in supporting business objectives, resilient in accommodating changing business conditions and technologies, and useful in producing a practical information architecture that can be applied to business operations. Examples of the ISA approach that support systems management are discussed for representative types of enterprise in the manufacturing sector and the service sector:

1. The Manufacturing/Distribution Enterprise example uses automated manufacturing and materials handling systems supported by MRPII software to integrate engineering, distribution, and financial systems; and
2. The Financial Services Enterprise example applies automated transaction processing using image processing and document management systems to achieve improved products and a more productive workflow with enhanced response to customers and/or clients.

     

A self-adaptation scheme for workflow management in multi-agent systems

Business processes, operational environment, variability of resources and user needs may change from time to time. An effective workflow management software system must be able to accommodate these changes. The ability to dynamically adapt to changes is a key success factor for workflow management systems. Holonic multi-agent systems (HMS) provide a flexible and reconfigurable architecture to accommodate changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Although HMS provides a potential architecture to accommodate changes, the dynamic organization formed in HMS poses a challenge in the development of a new software development methodology to dynamically compose the services and adapt to changes as needed. This motivates us to study and propose a methodology to design self-adaptive software systems based on the HMS architecture. In this paper, we formulate a workflow adaptation problem (WAP) and propose an interaction mechanism based on contract net protocol (CNP) to find a solution to WAP to compose the services based on HMS. The interaction mechanism relies on a service publication and discovery scheme to find a set of task agents and a set of actor agents to compose the required services in HMS. We propose a viable self-adaptation scheme to reconfigure the agents and the composed services based on cooperation of agents in HMS to accommodate the changes in workflow and capabilities of actors. We propose architecture for our design methodology and present an application scenario to illustrate our idea.     

集成工作流与Multi-agents技术的供应链协同管理

提出了集成工作流与软件Agent技术的供应链协同管理框架及方法，通过工作流管理系统及多Agcnt的设计，应用XML描述的工作流过程规范，由软件Agent实时地执行和重置具体的工作流任务，从而达到供应链协调管理的目的。     

工作流管理的现状和未来趋势

工作流管理是一个新兴的研究领域,被誉为信息系统的后勤,它让合适的人或软件在恰当的时间执行正确的工作,使计算机上的业务处理流程自动化。本文用历史的观点对工作流管理的发展历程进行了回顾,揭示了工作流管理对未来信息系统的影响。根据分析当前的工作流管理系统,我们总结了两个主要不足之处;（1）工作流管理系统的定义不明确以及缺乏统一的概念模型,（2）工作流管理系统的系统结构和能力上的不足,并对工作流管理的未来发展趋势从建模和实施两个方面进行了预测。     

工作流过程建模方法及模型的形式化验证

Work/low technology is widely used in business process modeling, software process modeling as well as en-terprise information integration. At present, there exist a variety of workflow modeling approaches, which differ in the easiness of modeling, expressiveness and formalism. In this paper, the modeling approaches most used in research project and workflow products are compared. And the verification of workflow model is also dealt. We argue that a ideal workflow modelin~ approach is a hybrid one, i.e. the inteuration of the above approaches.     

工作流管理系统技术现状及其发展趋势

随着计算机技术的发展和应用,工作流管理技术势必成为企业集成业务流程、节约运作成本的重要环节,工作流技术正经历迅猛发展,新型的工作流管理系统不断出现,有必要对工作流技术的发展现状及其趋势做一个总结,本文主旨也正在于此。     

工作流管理系统技术现状及其发展趋势

随着计算机技术的发展和应用,工作流管理技术势必成为企业集成业务流程、节约运作成本的重要环节,工作流技术正经历迅猛发展,新型的工作流管理系统不断出现,有必要对工作流技术的发展现状及其趋势做一个总结,本文主旨也正在于此。     

工作流系统时间管理

时间管理是工作流管理软件系统的关键部分,也是工作流技术实施复杂企业应用的严重局限.开展时间管理研究,对于增强工作流管理软件系统的柔性、确保工作流计划的高效执行和提高企业的竞争力具有重要意义.时间管理的关键在于时间信息的有效建模.首先介绍了工作流管理系统的时间问题.其次,综述了时间建模与分析的研究现状,包括时间约束的建模、时序一致性验证与时间违反的处理.最后,基于对现有研究方法的分析与评价,指出了工作流系统时间管理的发展方向.时间管理的支持对于开发灵活性和实用性的工作流管理系统具有重要的指导意义.     

基于Web Service的异构工作流管理系统的集成和互操作研究

本文首先分析了分布、异构工作流管理系统的互操作对各种交互模式的需求，针对 现有的工作流管理系统的分布式应用解决方案的不足之处，提出了一种基于Web Service的支持分布、异构工作流管理系统之间集成和互操作的实现方法．Web Service因其开放、标准化而受到业界广泛重视，已成为新一代基于Internet建立分布式应用的规范．本文从异构工作流管理系统之间的信息集成、工作流引擎之间调用语义的实现、工作流执行服务的描述、发布和绑定等方面，论述了Web Service对异构工作流管理系统之间集成和互操作的支持．     

基于工作流的CIMS应用集成支持系统研究

先进制造业模式要求企业不但要实现信息集成,而且要实现过程集成。基于工作流技术和分布对象技术,文章设计了一个能够有效实现企业信息集成与过程集成的集成支持系统。给出了其系统体系结构和软件系统结构,在此基础上,进一步研究了其信息集成机制和过程集成机制。文章的工作为企业快速高效地实施 ＣＩＭＳ应用集成提供了一个新的思路。     

面向网格服务的工作流系统应用集成研究

工作流管理系统(WfMS)已经成为实现企业应用集成的重要手段,然而,随着开放网格体系结构的迅速发展,现有的工作流管理系统难以实现工作流系统内部和外部应用的无缝集成。在研究网格服务的基础上提出了面向网格服务的工作流系统应用集成方案,给出了体系结构,分析了工作流系统借助GT3中间件使用网格服务的过程。该方案将所有的集成接口统一为网格服务,比原有的工作流系统模型具有跨平台、接口统一、实现简单等优点,从而能够使得工作流系统应用真正实现无缝集成。     

Process-oriented architectures for electronic commerce and interorganizational workflow

The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary Electronic commerce (E-commerce). Although the emphasis has moved from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to the Internet, the focus is still on the technology required to exchange information rather than supporting business processes crossing organizational borders. E-commerce is not just about facilitating individual business transactions, it also comprises the management of the causal relations between these transactions. This paper stresses the process aspect of E-commerce by relating it to workflow management. Traditional workflow management systems assume one centralized enactment service and have problems dealing with dynamic changes and local variations. Since E-commerce is characterized by interorganizational workflows distributed over autonomous business units, these systems tend to be useless in the context of E-commerce. This paper reviews new and existing architectures to enable interorganizational workflow. The presentation focuses on two approaches to partition an interorganizational workflow over multiple business partners. Both approaches are evaluated. One of the key concerns in this paper is the possibility to verify the correctness of the interorganizational workflow. The dynamics of the marketplace, with rapid changing business processes and relationships, underlines the need for verification tools.     

Context-aware workflow management for virtual enterprises based on coordination of agents

Although virtual enterprises (VE) make it possible for small flexible enterprises to form a collaborative network to respond to business opportunities through dynamic coalition and sharing of the core competencies and resources, they also pose new challenges and issues. Creation of VE involves dynamically established partnerships between the partners and relies on a flexible coordination scheme. The dynamic organizations formed in VE present a challenge in the development of a new methodology to dynamically allocate re-sources and deliver the relevant information to the right people at the right time. A key issue is the development of an effective workflow management scheme for VE. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a flexible architecture to deal with changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Despite the extensive studies and research results on MAS, development of a design methodology to support coordination and operations is critical to the success and adoption of VE. The objectives of this research are to propose a design methodology to facilitate coordination and development of context-aware workflow management systems and achieve effective resource allocation for VE based on MAS architecture. To achieve these objectives, a scheme for coordination of agents is proposed. Petri net models are used in the coordination scheme to describe workflows and capture resource activities in VE. The interactions between agents lead to a dynamic workflow model for VE. Based on the aforementioned model, we propose architecture to dynamically generate context-aware graphical user interface to guide the users and control resource allocation based on the state of VE. An order management example is used throughout this paper to illustrate the proposed design methodology.     

Using mobile agents to support interorganizational workflow management

This article argues that the mobile agent approach is well suited for sporadic communication in open distributed systems, especially for rather ''loose'' cooperations across local and organizational boundaries. In an increasing number of cases, management of distributed business procedures reaches beyond such boundaries. This means, for most existing workflow management systems, that cooperating partners are required to give up their local autonomy. However, for cases in which business partners intend to cooperate but still need to preserve their local autonomy, process participation on the basis of mobile agents represents an appropriate mechanism. This article shows how such process integration can be achieved. It also demonstrates how the Common Open Service Market (COSM) system software can be extended in order to use petri-net based process definitions that realize mobile agents in an integrated distributed system platform.     

Standards-based approaches to B2B workflow integration

E-business automates the overall activities of a company and allows distributed systems to communicate their information. Process automation and information sharing improve a company’s productivity and responsiveness, while Business-to-Business (B2B) workflow systems electronically aid the progress of business processes among trading partners, and also help companies to monitor and administrate their process execution. This study analyzes the technologies and standards for B2B workflow integration, and extracts a reference model for B2B workflow integration. Based on the reference model, three approaches to B2B workflow integration will be introduced here. In addition, we have developed a prototype system of one approach and have illustrated an example for B2B workflow integration. The result of our research can help business partners understand the workflow standards and the messaging technologies for B2B workflow integration, and also help them understand how to implement workflow integration systems that are appropriate to their e-business environments.     

An object-oriented approach to the management of distributed application systems

General purpose distributed object-oriented environments exist to allow for the efficient construction of client/server software systems. Standard network and distributed systems management environments exist for the efficient operation of heterogeneous networked hardware and software systems. As distributed software systems get larger, the economies of systems development and the economies of software operation demand that we find an efficient way of integrating these two technologies. While the use of standardized distributed systems management for the management of distributed software applications seems reasonable, very little research has been done to confirm this. In this paper, we propose the integration of standardized distributed resource management technologies and distributed application software. In our work we have facilitated this integration using techniques based on mainstream object-oriented dynamic modeling. We will describe our techniques of integration as well as discuss the need for methodical engineered approaches when working in this area.     

工作流管理的发展历程和趋势

工作流管理被誉为信息系统的后勤,它让合适的人或软件在恰当的时间执行正确的工作,使计算机上的业务处理流程自动化。本文用历史的观点对工作流管理的发展历程进行了回顾,揭示了工作流管理对未来信息系统的影响。根据分析当前的工作流管理系统,我们总结出流程建模和系统结构方面的不足,并对工作流管理的未来发展趋势从建模和
和实施两个方面进行了预测。     

An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure

Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area. Recomended by: Omran Bukhres and e. Kühn