Beyond app-chaining: Mobile app orchestration for efficient model driven software generation

Mobile apps are a success story for mobile devices, particularly in the consumer sector. Tailored to a specific task, they offer optimal usability for a defined class of devices. However, today´s apps are neither designed to collaborate with complex workflows nor to support these. To overcome this limitation, we developed the concept of Mobile App Orchestration. This pragmatic model driven software generation approach makes it possible to use mobile apps even in complex industrial workflows. We demonstrate the entire development process in a use case and explain solutions and challenges of our approach. An experimental evaluation of a manually conducted orchestration with 11 participants supports our design hypothesis that the proposed approach can deliver usable mobile support systems for Virtual Factories.