Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4 Real World Scenario
Business Process Management (BPM) is an important topic for many organi-
zations.
Workflow management system
s are widely deployed to automate and
streamline business processes used within an organization. The purpose of such
systems consists of managing workflow models, workflow execution, assignment
and distributions of tasks (
work items
) and providing monitoring functionality,
which allows management and process engineers to review workflow execution,
improve the workflow models and intervene if there are problems [9]. Typical
workflow management systems consist of centralized software which is deployed
on a server and accessed using a web interface. This limits the flexibility regard-
ing system configuration and makes it vulnerable to server breakdowns.
These shortcomings have been partially remedied by a distributed workflow
management system implementation shown in Fig. 6, which is based on the cloud
infrastructure presented in this paper. The system is partitioned into five compo-
nents which can be distributed and replicated across multiple platforms and act
together to provide the functionality of the system. The
access component
man-
ages access to the system by external clients connecting to it, providing a unified
interface to invoke system functions. User authentication and authorization is
delegated to the
authentication component
. The access component uses dynamic
service discovery to find available authentication services and therefore allows
the authentication component to be replaced by an alternative at runtime.
Execution of workflows is handled by the
execution component
, including the
workflow model repository and the execution service. The model repository uses
the functionality of the platform layer to deploy workflow models which can
then be started by the execution service. Executing workflows emit tasks to
be performed by system users. Tasks are represented by
work items
,whichare
processed and distributed to the users by the
work item management component
.
Finally, the
monitoring component
receives events such as work item comple-
tion, user authentications and process execution from the other system services
and stores them until accessed using the access component. Like the authentica-
tion component, this relationship is also dynamic and allows service substitution.
Fig. 6.
Architecture of the workflow management system
