A Process Engine Independent Architecture Enabling Robust Execution of Mobile Tasks in Business Processes

With the fast improvements of mobile technology in the last century, the importance of mobile and pervasive computing has increased in all disciplines of computer science. The new technologies have set the stage for a whole set of new applications (e.g., medical- and business-applications). Since Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) are an established and widely used technique in various businesses and industries to manage recurring workflows and to support people in performing their tasks efficiently, the integration of mobile support into a business process environment is desirable. In prior research work, a framework to foster the execution of business processes on mobile devices was introduced. It describes a life cycle for mobile tasks based on an automated delegation mechanism and a backup operation for escalation handling. In this work, the framework will be extended to cope with crucial shortcomings such as the execution of mobile tasks in an unreliable network. Using this, an architectural concept for integrating mobile processes into an existing business process environment will be introduced. A three layer architecture that introducing an intermediate service layer for the mobile task execution will be used to minimize the impact on underlying systems. Additionally, a prototype has been implemented, which will be evaluated against three BPMSs, to prove the feasibility of this approach.