Workflow process definition and their applications in e-commerce

Recently many enterprises face the pressures, such as market competition, reduction of cost 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 art important role that provides back-end services to response front-end requirements. The workflow technique reduces the time of process, allocates resource powerfully and improves the performance of enterprises. Furthermore, process definition is the core of workflow. Process definition defines all of necessary information related to business process and executed by the workflow management system. Therefore, the integrity and accuracy of process definition will affect the result of execution. In this paper, we propose UML(Unified Modeling Language) and Petri Nets approach for workflow modeling. Our approach consists of four phases: (1) process requirement, elicitation phase; (2) logical design phase; (3) properties analysis phase; (4) physical deployment phase.