ROME4EU: A Web Service-Based Process-Aware System for Smart Devices

Nowadays, process-aware information systems (PAISs) are widely used for the management of “administrative” processes characterized by clear andwell-defined structure. Besides such scenarios, PAISs can be used also in mobile and pervasive scenarios, such as in coordinating operators during emergency situations [1]. In these pervasive settings, due to highlymobility, operators have to be equippedwith small devices, such as PDAs, and to communicate through ad-hoc networks. At the best of our knowledge, all of available PAISs allow currently to execute on smart devices only client applications, such as work-list handlers for accepting/refusing the assigned tasks. The engines at the heart of PAISs, which are in charge of assigning tasks to process participants, are still designed to be executed on standard desktop machines. Therefore, the current PAISs cannot really work in pervasive and highly mobile scenarios where the entire system has to be deployed on the spot and running on smart devices. The possibility of having a remote coordination center where a PAIS engine is running is not really feasible. Assigning tasks to team members and orchestrating the process execution remotely would require to exist an underlying infrastructure reliable and fast. That is not the case in these settings where the best case would be having a GPRS/UMTS connection. Furthermore, the Hurricane Catrina experience has taught us that if every team used such an infrastructure, it would be going to fall down or would become too slow. In the light of this, we have developed a PAIS, namely ROME4EU (The Roman Orchestration Mobile Engine for Emergency Units) 1, whose engine resides on the MS Windows Mobile PDA of the team leader. Modern PDAs are becoming increasingly powerful and, hence, able to execute complex applications. Team Members are also equipped with PDAs and their work is coordinated by the PAIS running on the team leader PDA. That makes ROM4EU really applicable in pervasive scenarios. In ROME4EU, process schemas are defined in the form of Activity Diagrams enriched for describing all the different aspects: definition of tasks in term of