Robust Execution of Mobile Activities in Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract

Process management technology constitutes a crucial component of service-oriented environments as it facilitates the composition of services at design time and their orchestration at run time. In this context, high flexibility is required as business functions must be quickly adaptable to cope with dynamic changes in the business. The tremendous proliferation of smart mobile devices over the last years has fostered their prevalence in knowledge-intensive areas. As a result, it is frequently demanded to enhance process-aware information systems with mobile activity support. The latter constitutes process activities (i.e., single process steps) to be executed on smart mobile devices. In general, the technical integration of this activity type with existing process management technology is challenging. If a mobile context shall be additionally considered when executing the activities, the integration gets even more complex. However, the use of such a mobile context offers several advantages. For example, (mobile) activity execution time can be significantly decreased if mobile activities are only assigned to those users whose location is close to the one of the mobile activity. Existing research approaches mainly focus on the partitioning of processes and the distributed execution of the resulting fragments on smart mobile devices. Opposed to this fragmentation concept, this paper proposes an approach to enable the robust and flexible execution of single process activities on smart mobile devices.