Research of the Interconnection of Workflow System Based on Web Service

Abstract

In order to achieve the interconnection between different workflow management systems, it was proposed that all the distributed workflow systems would be encapsulated as web services to perform the entire business process collaboratively by the way of processes’ composition in this paper. By analyzing the comparison between the composition of processes and ordinary Web service, we studied interactive control, the parameters required to be passed through the distributed workflow systems, the workflow system service’s interfaces and its packaging. Furthermore we put forward a general method of the workflow systems interactive interfaces’ extension and the way of the workflow service’s encapsulating and invoking. By this approach, it can easily combine the processes or process fragments which deployed on different workflow systems without other agents and components. It also provides support for the interconnection of the workflow systems in distributed environment, and ultimately achieves a coordinated operation between different workflow engines.