Extending Business Processes with Mobile Task Support

Abstract

Process management technology constitutes a fundamental component of any service-driven computing environment. Process management facilitates both the composition of services at design-time and their orchestration at runtime. In particular, when applying the service paradigm to enterprise integration, high flexibility is required. In this context, atomic as well as composite services representing the business functions should be quickly adaptable to cope with dynamic business changes. Furthermore, they should enable mobile and quick access to enterprise information. The growing maturity of smart mobile devices has fostered their prevalence in knowledge-intensive areas in the enterprise as well. As a consequence, process management technology needs to be extended with mobile task support. However, process tasks, hitherto executed in a stationary manner, cannot be simply transferred to run on smart mobile devices. Many research groups focus on the partitioning of processes and the distributed execution of the resulting fragments on smart mobile devices. Opposed to this fragmentation concept, this chapter proposes an approach to enable the robust and flexible execution of single process tasks on smart mobile devices by provisioning self-healing techniques to address the smooth integration of mobile tasks with business processes.