Mobile Process - Workflows for Mobile centric services composition

Introduction

This research has explored how smart mobile computing devices can truely participate as equal participants in business processes. We have also addressed on how mobile computing devices can run existing traditional business process technologies on a purely device-centric and mobile infrastructure-centric manner.
The results of our research has led to developing Mobile process a.k.a. Mobile workflow engine, a novel approach to realize next generation mobile business processes. This is very relevant in places where mobile devices are the only computers which can company mobile workforce. Mobile Process is a service composition platform which helps re-use existing mobile and network based services / application and develop total experiences that leverage all capabilities of mobile devices and network based services into new services and applications.
This solution enables easy integration, invocation and utilisation of the current core assets of the mobile platform to deploy new composable applications or integrate them into different services. This is enabled by means of XML based declarative markup technologies. All one needs to do is create:

• A set of web pages (including standard forms), such as xHTML (which can include Javascript, CSS, etc)
• Define the application logic using a open web integration/composition standards such as WS-BPEL descriptions Deploy set of web pages including application logic into the process repository existing in the mobile device.

The Mobile Process platform itself provides a set of core web services interfaces which any Mobile Process application can utilise as part of its application and interaction logic. For example a Process application such as expense claim process can utilise the browser Web Service Interface (WSI) to interact with the user to collect the product cost, personal details, etc for the expense claim and utilise the Messaging WSI to dispatch the claim over MMS to a manager to seek for approval. The Process application can utilise the Service APIs to invoke local applications and as well as utilise the communication /transportation channels to communicate with process running outside the device enabling inter-process or even external service interactions. The Figure 1 depicts here the Mobile Process application platform. The Process application consists or a WS-BPEL Document and a set of Web pages are bundled and deployed into the Process repository. The user interacts with the application using the standard Messaging application user interface.

Figure 1: Mobile Process: Service Composition Platform

The Mobile process engine communicates with external systems (another device or service) using SOAP messages over Bluetooth, MMS and HTTP. The inter-process communications across devices is maintained by means of uninque message ids which directly relate and map to a specific process when they are used across multiple devices.
This research is part of Virtual Office Research program.