An Improved Cooperative Model for Web Service Based Workflow Management

In this paper, we introduce a novel Web service based cooperative workflow model which not only greatly improves the efficiency of concurrent processing but also makes results combination easier. Web service based workflows provide support for aggregating Web services into new higher-level Web services by means of process composition. We add states and actions to the activity, and realize the cooperation between different activities. Petri-nets are used to analyze and verify the proposed model. A cooperative businesses process is also modeled by Petri-nets as a demonstration. In addition, we realize the model in an open source cooperative workflow software-Bonita and test it with the ActiveBPEL engine. Then we apply the model to a cooperative car design scenario. The results indicate that the proposed model is valid and effective.