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-