Design and implementation of an open source XPDL compliant workflow engine

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) are getting important day by day as they allow one to automate, speed up and increase efficiency of work in enterprise. This paper presents key aspects of design and implementation of a Workflow Management System engine (the core of WfMS in short). Brief history and future trends of WfMS development have been shown and reasonable consderations towards XPDL as a standard to choose have been made basing on BPM industry surveys. Also the anaylsis of BPM standards shows the place of XPDL among other noticeable standards like BPMN and BPEL, that are rather complements then competitors with respect to XPDL. We base our architecture of WfMS on the Open Business Engine(OBE) architecture that complies to our needs as it takes into accont Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) standards (Workflow Reference Model or XPDL specification, for instance) and allows us to use modern thechnologies, like Java EE, that gives application security, transaction control, resource management and other features. Finally we present our WfMS engine that supports XPDL 1.0 and runs on Java EE 5 certified application server JBoss 5.