Developing an Extendable Process Engine using Cross-Platform Technologies

Despite the increasing digitization in everyday work and industry, data collection is still often based on paper-based questionnaires. One of the areas of application where the disadvantages come to bear are large-scale studies, such as clinical trials. In such studies, an enormous amount of paper and staff is needed for transcription, which leads to logistical problems as well as error susceptibility. The reasons why paper-based questionnaires are still used are often a lack of IT knowledge of the involved, difficult to use existing software, as well as high costs for the development of new customized software. The QuestionSys framework aims to solve these problems. It supports all steps of data collection from the creation of a questionnaire, through its execution on mobile devices, to the analysis of the collected data. In order to ensure a high degree of flexibility when creating questionnaires, questionnaires are mapped to process models which can then be executed by mobile devices. In the context of this thesis, a lightweight mobile process engine has been developed that allows to execute the process models of the QuestionSys framework. The focus was on process execution, support for several operating systems and easy extensibility. For this purpose, this thesis discusses related work, before the architecture of the engine is presented on the basis of defined requirements. In the following chapter, parts of the implementation are explained, which ultimately leads to an outlook.