Workflow based approach for designing and executing mobile agents

While researching integration aspects of cloud Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) with on-premises applications, authors have identified various scenarios that cannot be effectively addressed using existing integration solutions and patterns. Mobile Agents (MAs) were proposed as the technology addressing these integration challenges [30]. During the research, existing MA platforms were analyzed what led to conclusion that none of them is fully addressing specific requirements of end-users in BPM scenarios. The main concern was related to agent development experience - in existing platforms it is required that user creating an agent has at least some understanding of programming concepts. In addition, authors have identified that there is no standard approach for packaging agents that is used across platforms. To address these issues new approach for designing and executing mobile agents is proposed. This approach is based on workflows and enables end-users having no programming skills to design MAs what is critical in BPM scenarios. In addition, a new approach for packaging mobile agents is proposed. It is based on industry used standards and open specifications. Proposed approach is extendable and may be reused for designing and/or packaging MAs in other domains as well.