Abstract
The design and development of a Web-based Workflow Management System (WfMS) is described in this paper. WfMSs are employed by many organizations to manage their business processes efficiently. The goal of this research is to provide an effective management of design processes in a distributed and heterogeneous environment-an environment in which workflow participants are geographically dispersed and use different computing platforms. We identify the requirements of WfMSs for the distributed and heterogeneous environment. We present an approach to applying the Web technology to was. The developed system is composed of three main modules: Worflow Engine, Web-based clients, and Process Designer. The workflow engine is implemented in pure Java for portability to heterogeneous platforms. furthermore, the client interfaces are all programmed using applets, and thus they can be readily accessed through the Internet/intranet. The Process Designer provides a build-time function of generating process specifications. Some important functions of the developed system are explained in this paper. A prototype system has been developed and applied to design processes. The system allows effective cooperation among designers who may be geographically separated.
