Supporting Mobile Workflow with Active Entities

Workflow modeling is well suited for scenarios where many entities work collaboratively towards a common goal, and it is vastly used to model complex business processes. Besides, the workflow model can be applied to a wide variety of domains. This paper shows how to use workflows to model collaboration in ad-hoc mobile environments. Particularly, it introduces the concept of "active entity", which is a network-isolated subcomponent of a workflow process. It is shown how active entities overcome the challenges of an ad-hoc mobile environment. The support required for this workflow extension in terms of lightweight software architecture for mobile device is also described.