Collaboration support through mobile processes and entailment constraints

The computational capability of smart mobile devices increasingly fosters their prevalence in many business domains. Along this trend, process management technology is going to be enhanced with mobile task support. However, tasks executed stationarily so far cannot be simply transfered to mobile devices. For the latter purpose, we developed an approach within the MARPLE project enabling mobile and robust task execution in the context of business processes. In particular, this approach provides self-healing techniques that relieve mobile users from manually handling errors (e.g., lost connections) during mobile task execution. In this paper, we extend the collaboration facilities of our approach by adding entailment constraints to mobile task management. In the context of a business process, for example, two tasks may have to be executed by the same (mobile) user. Related research on integrating such constraints with business processes has received growing attention recently. However, realizing entailment constraints in the context of mobile processes and tasks raises additional issues, which must be probably integrated with the mentioned error handling techniques. We present fundamental entailment constraints supported by our approach and discuss how they can be realized in a robust and flexible manner. In particular, this will significantly enhance mobile task and process support in next generation information systems.