Modeling and Generating Mobile Business Processes

A mobile business process is a special case of a business process where most of the human interaction is done using mobile devices. In this paper, we propose UML-based support for developing such mobile business processes. Here, the business process is first modeled using UML. Then the process model is translated into a BPEL description, which can be run in mobile and/or network-based workflow engines. We propose rules to guide modeling of mobile business processes, to import existing WSDL decriptions into UML models, and to generate executable BPEL descriptions with appropriate WSDL definitions. In addition, we introduce our implementation of the approach. The practical applicability is demonstrated by designing a group messaging process. It provides a customizable mobile device based communication service offering a business case for mobile operators.