A framework for dynamic workflow interoperation and enterprise application integration using multi-subprocess task

Abstract

Conventional workflows are usually designed for a single organization and predefine a set of applications. However, when a workflow process is related with many organizations and a diverse set of applications at run time, users are required to predefine every detail of the workflow processes in the conventional workflow systems. The predefined process might be very complicated and it should be redefined when new systems join or some systems change their services. Many approaches have been proposed to make the workflow process simpler and adapt to the changes of the services. They usually adopt a subprocess task that represents a single subprocess. When a subprocess task requires to represent multiple subprocesses, existing approaches handle the situation indirectly by predefining several subprocess tasks or creating another subprocess representing several subprocess tasks. However if the number of subprocesses is not known until run-time and moreover, the execution sequence among them is not known until runtime, conventional approaches cannot handle the situation because they must predefine all the potentially reachable paths. In this paper, we propose a framework for dynamic workflow interoperation and enterprise application integration using multi-subprocess task. In the proposed framework, the multi-subprocess task represents multiple subprocesses of which the number and execution order are not known until run-time. When a multi-subprocess task manager takes over the control from the previous task manager, it decides which and how many subprocesses are required based on the context data and creates subprocess mangers to handle subprocesses according to the decision. At that time the execution flow of the subprocesses is devised based on the dispatching rules. The dispatching rule is constructed referring to WfMC standard and Flexible Change Control (FCC) Mechanism of CrossFlow project. Once an event dispatcher takes over the control, it makes workflow ...