Abstract
The coming of network age has brought many benefits to the enterprises. By the link of computer networks, the communication between enterprises and the outside world becomes more quickly and easily than before. With this advantage, more enterprises use the Collaborative-Product-Commerce (CPC) as the platform for product development to improve the efficiency. However, the enterprise’s information environment is actually not as safe as usual because of two reasons. Firstly, in reality, most of the new information systems are developed on the basis of the old ones, In order to implement the CPC architecture, parts of the workflows have to re-design manually. Many of these workflows involve the interaction with external enterprises. Secondly, the enterprises have to face an open network environment.In order to solve these information security problems, this research intends to develop an agent-based workflow control system, based on the Role-Based-Access- Control (RBAC) theory. This system consists of three modules, i.e., workflow control module, process definition module and resource management module. By utilizing the agents’ capability of collaborating with each others, the system controls the workflow according to the process definition. The system also arrives at the intention of access controlling by means of the event driven mechanism.Development of the proposed system is conducted by using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as the modeling tool, along with a development procedure which takes risk evaluation and risk reduction into consideration. The whole procedure can be divided into four stages. In the first stage, the major task is to decide the scope of the system by the interview with the system’s future users to realize the system’s goal and definition. In the second stage, the functions involved in the system have to be determined after the communication with domain experts via Use-Case catching and diagrams drawing. The static structure and dynamic behavior of the whole system also have to be realized. The third stage is to set up all the required specifications by using UML diagrams’ drawing. Finally, system coding and component packing are executed.In order to verify the system’s capability of solving the information security problems under CPC environment, the research uses the “Engineering-Change process” as a discussion case. The result shows that the proposed agent based workflow control system provides a good solution for the enterprise’s information security problems by the workflow controlling and event-driven authorization mechanism.