以XML為基礎之跨組織工作流程整合架構與其應用

An XML-Based Inter-Organizational Workflow Integration Framework and Its Applications

10.6188/JEB.2005.7(1).06

林立鴻(Li-Hung Lin)；曾守正(Frank S. C. Tseng)

企業應用系統整合 ； 異質性資料庫整合 ； 工作流程 ； XML ； Enterprise Application Integration ； Heterogeneous Database Integration ； Workflow ； XML ； RosettaNet

電子商務學報

7卷1期（2005 / 03 / 01）

87 - 119

繁體中文

在當代的商業環境下，可以說是資訊科技促使企業策略變革的年代。從供應鏈管理、企業資源規劃、顧客關係管理以及知識管理等課題受到企業的日益重視，已足以證明：資訊科技已經儼然成為企業增加核心競爭力的不二法門。然而，想要有效地整合電子化企業，首重「企業應用系統整合」(Enterprise Application Integration，EAI)，尤其是跨越組織之間的異質性系統整合。其主要功能在解讀並轉換來自異質性系統間不同應用程式的資料，並導入統一的工作流程，籍以整合這些應用程式間的協同運作，提供資料格式的轉換，同步或非同步的自動化流程處理。 在本研究中，我們利用XML語言的自我描述功能及跨平台特性，做為電子資料交換的資訊載體，並提出一個以XML為基礎的工作流程系統整合架構。當系統產生所需的XML文件時，會觸發相對應的工作流程程序，在跨組織或異質性系統間達到資訊傳遞與整合的功能。以XML做為文件主要資訊承載的媒體，可以讓整個過程具有廣泛而多元的表示能力。可以表示的內容包含了：相關公文資訊、流程描述、流程核銷記錄等。並結合系統定義的映對文件轉換規則，同時達到異質性資料庫橫向整合的目的。最後，我們並以一個跨越中華民國海關、經濟部加工出口區管理局，以及加工出口區內廠商的申請工作流程做為範例，來說明整個系統架構的可行性。

The progress and proliferation of information technology inspire a paradigm shift for enterprises to draw up their strategic plans. As today's enterprises rush to pay more attentions on the topics regarding supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, or even know ledge management, it is obviously that information technology is becoming a core capability for promoting their competitiveness. To effectively integrate different enterprises via the cyberspace, the most important one to be tackled will be Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), especially for inter-organizational system integration. The main purpose is to interpret and transform data in various formats from heterogeneous systems, and then pass them into a unified workflow to coordinate the collaborative interoperability among applications either synchronously or asynchronously. In this paper, we propose a workflow integration framework based on XML, which gains the merits of self-descriptive and platform-independent hen it is utilized as a message carrier. Our framework can be tuned to trigger some pre-defined tasks to pass information and integrate the process across heterogeneous systems when the necessary XML documents are generated. The information can be encoded in XML is very versatile, from official documents, process descriptions, to any other types of document formats. Information represented in XML documents will be transformed accordingly conforming to some specific transformation rules to accomplish the horizontal integration among heterogeneous databases. Finally, we present an application process across the ROC Customs, Economic Processing Zone Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and any enterprise established in the Economic Processing Zone to verify the feasibility of our framework.

1. Aalst, W.M.P. van der(1999).Interorganizational workflows: An approach based on message sequence charts and Petri nets.System Analysis and Modeling,34(3),335-367.
2. Alonso, G.,Hagen, C.,Agrawal, D.,El Abbadi, A.,Mohan, C.(2000).Enhancing the fault tolerance of workflow management systems.IEEE Concurrency,8(3),74-81.
3. Bergholz, A.(2000).Extending your markup: An XML tutorial.IEEE Internet Computing,4(4),74-79.
4. Bertino, E.,B. Catania(2001).Integrating XML and databases.IEEE Computer,5(4),84-88.
5. XML and database
6. Bourret, R.,C. Bornhövd,A. Buchmann(2000).WECWIS.2000: Proc. the Second International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information Systems.
7. Chamberlin, D.(2002).XQuery: An XML query language.IBM Systems Journal,41(4),597-615.
8. Chen, Q.,M. Hsu,U. Dayal,M. Griss(2000).Proc. of the fourth international conference on Autonomous agents.Barcelona, Spain:
9. Chester, T.M.(2001).Cross-platform integration with XML and SOAP.IEEE IT Professional,3(5),26-34.
10. Draper, D.,A.Y. HaLevy,D.S. Weld(2001).Proc. of 17th International Conference on Data Engineering.
11. Gates, Bill(1999).Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System.Warner Books.
12. Gillmann, M.,J. Weissenfels,G. Shegalov,W. Wonner,G. Weikum(2000).Proc. ACM SIGMOD-International Conference on Management of Data.
13. Hagen, C.,Alonso, G.(2000).Exception handling in workflow management systems.IEEE Trans. Software Engineering,26(10),943-958.
14. Howes, T.,M. Smith(1997).LDAP: Programming directory-enabled applications with lightweight directory access protocol, Macmillan Technical Publishing.USA:
15. Kradolfer, M.,Geppert, A.(1999).Proc. 1999 IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems.
16. Kwan, M.M,P.R. Balasubramanian(1997).Proc. IEEE Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
17. Leymann, F.,D. Roller(1999).Production workflow: concepts and techniques.N.J., USA:Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
18. Li, J.Q.,Y.S. Fan,M.C. Zhou(2004).Performance modeling and analysis of workflow.IEEE Trans. Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans,34(2),229-242.
19. Loshin, P.(2000).Big book of lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) RFCs.CA, USA:Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco.
20. Meng, J.,S.Y.W. Su,H. Lam,A. Helal(2002).Achieving dynamic inter-organizational workflow management by integrating business processes, events, and rules.Proc. the 35(superscript th) Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,1(7)
21. The BizTalk Server
22. Workflow management in the Internet age
23. Ranganathan, A,S. McFaddin(2004).Proc. the IEEE International Conference on Web Se-vices (ICWS`04).
24. Roy, J.,A. Ramanujan(2000).XML: data`s universal language.IEEE IT Professional,2(3),32-36.
25. Roy, J.,A. Ramanujan(2001).XML schema language: taking XML to the next level.IEEE IT Professional,2(3),37-40.
26. Royappa, A.V.(1999).Proc. the 1999 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing.
27. Shegalov, G.,M. Gillmann,G. Weikum(2001).XML-enabled workflow management for e-services across heterogeneous platforms.The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases-the VLDB Journal,,10(1),91-103.
28. Siebel, Thmoas. M.(2002).Taking care of eBusiness: how today`s market leaders are increasing revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction, Moderne Industrie.
29. Java Web Services Developer Pack
30. Tseng, F.S.C.(2004).Proc. The 14(superscript th) ACME International Conference on Pacific Rim Management 2004 Annual Meeting.Chicago, USA:
31. Vidal, J.M.,P. Buhler,C. Stahl(2004).Multi-agent systems with workflows.IEEE Internet Computing,8(1),76-82.
32. WfMC: The Workflow Management Coalition(2000).Workflow and Internet: catalysts for radical change.A WfMC White Paper.
33. WfMC: The Workflow Management Coalition(2000).Workflow standard-Interoperability Wf-XML binding.
34. Xu, Q,R. Qiu,F. Xu(2003).Proc. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.Washington DC:
35. Yan, S.B.,F.J. Wang(2004).Proc. the 10(superscript th) IEEE International Conference on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems.Suzhou, China:
36. Yu, H.,X. Bai,G.Q. Wang,Y.C. Ji,D.C. Marinescu(2004).Proc. The 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS`04).
37. Zhang S.,N. Gu,S. Li(2004).Proc. the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC`04).
38. Zisman, A.(2000).Journal of Computing & Control Engineering.
39. 黃逸華(2002)。e-Business 8大原則•5步驟。台北:城邦文化。
40. 樂為良(1999)。數位神經系統－與思考等快的明日世界。台北:商周。