Abstract User Interfaces for Mobile Processes

Abstract

Abstract. An important focus of recent business process management systems is on the distributed, self-contained and even disconnected execution of processes involving mobile devices. Such an execution context leads to the class of mobile processes which are able to migrate between mobile and stationary devices in order to share functionalities and resources provided by the entire (mobile) environment. However, both the description and the execution of tasks which involve interactions of mobile users still require the executing device and its context to be known in advance in order to come up with a suitable user interface. Since this seems not appropriate for such decentralized and highly dynamic mobile processes, this work focuses on the integration of manual tasks on the respective ad-hoc creation of user interfaces at runtime. As an important prerequisite for that, this paper first presents an abstract and modalityindependent interaction model to support the development and execution of user-centric mobile processes. Furthermore, the paper describes a prototype implementation for a corresponding system infrastructure component based on a service-oriented execution module, and, finally, shows its integration into the DEMAC (Distributed Environment for Mobility-Aware Computing) middleware.

MUIT: A Domain-Specific Language and its Middleware for Adaptive Mobile Web-Based User Interfaces in WS-BPEL

“…It needs to import a new element such as <b4p:peopleActivity> and inevitably instruments current WS-BPEL infrastructures, thereby introducing additional maintenance cost [23]. Another reason is that, the two extensions mostly concentrate on the specification of manual human-oriented tasks, but lack the possibility to describe a user interface in detail [24] [25]. In practice, human tasks usually require user experiences such as data visualization, form, dashboard, and so on.…”

“…Russo et al [5] proposed ROME4EU, a mobile process-aware information system that was developed for the coordination of emergency operators. Zaplata et al [32] [24] proposed an abstract user interface model that can be applied on J2ME-compliant mobile devices such as PDAs. In addition, they suggested that thin client approaches like Web technologies were limited in terms of unreliable network and rich user experiences support on PDAs.…”