Christian P. Kunze

Mobile process description and execution

Mobile devices are increasingly aware of their respective locations and vicinity and tend to communicate rather loosely with each other; therefore asynchronous communication paradigms are used predominately so far for corresponding mobile applications. However, while such communication mechanisms are suitable for simple activities, they may become insufficient for more complex tasks which consist of longer sequences of related activities tied together in application-oriented processes. This is of particular importance if the resulting operating sequence spans several mobile devices in frequently changing vicinities. Therefore, the work presented here provides a concept for integrating explicit support for such mobile processes into mobile system infrastructures and for distributing their execution over different nodes in the network. For this purpose, a corresponding middleware platform (extension) for context-aware mobile applications is proposed. It supports such migrating processes and helps to execute them under the restrictions typically imposed by realistic mobile applications. In particular, this paper proposes a corresponding process description language and an execution model for mobile and distributed (business) processes in the context of the project DEMAC (Distributed Environment for Mobility-Aware Computing).

Mobile Processes: Enhancing Cooperation in Distributed Mobile Environments

Currently, context awareness is one of the main trends in distributed mobile computing environments. Against this background, the demand for more complex – and additionally long-term – mobile applications increases continuously. Nevertheless, most current available mobile applications – as well as their supporting middleware platforms – are still relatively monolithic and closed systems, concentrating on only short-term activities. As a consequence, most present appliances are still restricted to rather simple tasks and are therefore rather insufficient for more complex ones which consist of sequences of related long-term activities tied together in respective application-oriented processes. In order to overcome the resource and capability restrictions of mobile environments, such application processes may profit from, e.g., cooperation between devices in the mobile vicinity – a fact which is hardly supported by existing systems. Therefore, this paper introduces a concept for integrating explicit support for mobile processes into mobile system infrastructures and for distributing their execution over different nodes in the network. Additionally, a corresponding middleware platform for context-aware and cooperative mobile applications is proposed. This framework has been designed and realized in the context of project DEMAC (Distributed Environment for Mobility-Aware Computing) which supports such migrating processes and helps to execute them under the restrictions imposed by realistic mobile applications. In particular, this paper proposes a corresponding process description language and an execution model for such mobile (business) processes.

Enabling Context-Based Cooperation: A Generic Context Model and Management System

In order to realise complex service-based applications on system platforms for context-aware ubiquitous computing environments, mobile processes have been introduced to support cooperation among (mobile) devices by exchanging and executing arbitrary (business) processes. In such a view, middleware platforms that support the execution and migration of mostly a priori unknown processes need a generic and also application-independent context system. Accordingly, this paper presents an approach for a generic context model and management platform to support such context-based cooperation as currently developed and used in the project DEMAC (Distributed Environment for Mobility-Aware Computing).

A rule management framework for negotiating mobile agents

Proposes an application framework for mobile agents which provides rule-based generic services to support the three phases of a market transaction (information phase, contracting phase and settlement phase). It is described within the four views of an electronic market (the business view, the transaction view, the services view and the infrastructure view) which describe organizational as well as technological aspects. The focus of this paper is on the technological aspects of the contracting phase in which the participating agents carry out an automated negotiation process to determine the terms of contract.

Identity-Enriched Session Management

The Internet has become an important part in every day life for many users. It has changed from an instrument to exchange and link scientific data to an economical and social place, where people spend their working and spare time. But the underlying technology has not adapted to the newly risen demands of communication and collaboration. The user is almost isolated and anonymous when using the web, while still leaving traces threatening their data security and privacy. There is no global concept of “digital citizens” modern collaboration applications could base on. To overcome this lack, this paper introduces an approach of identity enriched session management. It offers the possibility to integrate different (and distinguishable!) users into meaningful relationships. This paper presents the essential concepts of identity enriched sessions and a prototypical realisation which have been developed in the “open net environment for Citizens” (onefC) project.

Abstract User Interfaces for Mobile Processes

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 modality-independent 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.