Workflows on Android: A Framework Supporting Business Process Execution and Rule-Based Analysis

In companies, Business Process Management is often supported by Process-aware information systems (PAIS). However, such systems are mostly restricted to stationary desktop computers. To overcome this restriction, smart mobile devices may be used for mobile business process execution. However, with traditional PAIS having a client-server architecture, the computation is done on server side, whereas the client only visualizes business process tasks and interacts with the user. Therefore, smart mobile devices must rely on their mobile connection to provide PAIS features to its users.

A possible solution is the transfer of server side features to the smart mobile device itself, enabling the latter to instantiate business process models and analyze business process instances by itself, without the need of a direct connection to a workflow-server.

This thesis presents Workflows on Android (WOtAN), a modular and flexible framework for business process management running on Android smart mobile devices. However, the thesis focuses on flexible and robust business process execution as well as the analysis of business process instances. For this, predefined evaluation rules are applied on data that was collected during business process instance execution.

Different concepts and interesting implementation aspects are presented in this thesis. Further, an application scenario is shown, where WOtAN is used to properly support a mobile data collection application.