Workflow Execution Engine Overview

This application consists of a workflow execution engine, which is the core component of the process management system. The engine is responsible for interpreting workflows, controlling multiple workflow instances, and sequencing subprocesses and activities.

These execution control functions invoke the appropriate human, equipment, and application resources necessary to complete a process. They act as the link between the process as modeled within the workflow and the process as it is seen in the real world.

The workflow execution engine is also responsible for starting and ending a workflow instance, controlling activity scheduling within an operational process, interacting with applications, process equipment, and human resources. This can be distributed across a number of computing resources to cope with the volume of processes that operate within a facility.

The execution engine records internal tracking data in workflows that includes the state information associated with a running workflow instance. The execution engine persists the workflow instance state when a subprocess completes. The persisted state can be used to recover and restart a workflow instance from failure conditions, or if it was stopped. If a workflow is stopped normally, the postsubprocess, postprocess, and unload steps run before the instance stops (they will not run if the server crashes). The workflow instance can continue from the start of the current subprocess by using the restart command. When this happens, the instance restarts by running the load, preprocess, and presubprocess steps. Then it restarts at the beginning of the subprocess that was running before the workflow stopped.

You can interact with the execution engine to monitor, troubleshoot, and debug a running workflow. This is a critical feature that allows you to identify and diagnose any issues with a workflow or any of its activities to work towards completion of the instance.