Workflow process definition and their applications in e-commerce

Recently, many enterprises have been facing pressures, such as market competition, reduction of costs and rapid development of new products and services. The workflow technique provides a new mechanism to help enterprises manage business processes efficiently. In the age of electronic commerce, workflow has played an important role that provides back-end services to respond to front-end requirements. The workflow technique reduces the processing time, allocates resources powerfully and improves the performance of enterprises. Furthermore, process definition is the core of workflow. Process definition defines all of the necessary information related to the business process and executed by the workflow management system. Therefore, the integrity and accuracy of the process definition will affect the result of the execution. In this paper, we propose the use of UML (Unified Modeling Language) and the Petri nets approach for workflow modeling. Our approach consists of four phases: (1) the process requirement elicitation phase; (2) the logical design phase; (3) the properties analysis phase; and (4) the physical deployment phase.