Design of a Workflow Engine Based on Product Structure

Abstract

The workflow management, in which the main line is the product, is used widely. The emergence of product structure makes workflow management more complex. This thesis focuses on the realization method of workflow engine based on product structure. Firstly, this paper describes the formal definition of the workflow based on product structure, and then gives the algorithm of instantiating workflow, the startup algorithms and the advance algorithms involved in the workflow execution in detail, finally, this paper shows the realization of the engine based on these algorithms. These algorithms described in this paper allow users to make decisions on designing and establishing the composition of the product structure flexible, to define the approval process of the task node flexible, and to advance the process according to the results of the instantiation automatically.