Modeling Mobile Workflows with BPMN

The basic idea of business process modeling is to identify the set of activities which has to be performed to reach a particular goal and to define a partial order on that set. A mobile business process is a process which has instances where individual activities are performed using a mobile computer like a PDA or a smartphone. The contribution of this paper is the introduction of a special modeling approach for such mobile business processes, which is based on the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Our modelling approach includes so called location constraints which can be assigned to individual activities of a BPMN diagram. Such a constraint makes a statement about the location where that activity has to be performed or is not allowed to be performed. A further feature of our approach are dynamic constraints, i.e., it is possible to derive location constraints during runtime of a workflow instance.