Integrating Workflow-Based Mobile Agents with Cloud Business Process Management Systems

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 [1]. 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. As a result, a new approach for designing and executing mobile agents was proposed. This approach is based on workflows and enables end-users having no programming skills to design MAs what is critical in BPM scenarios [2]. In addition existing researches cover different scenarios of how intelligent agents can be used in BPM space, however these do not address specific aspects of MA integration with cloud BPMS, what is critical for proposed solution. During analysis of this subject, authors have identified required integration components, and are proposing an algorithm that allows to determine how these components should be implemented based on technical specification of cloud BPMS. AgentWF prototype provides a sample implementation of all components, and demonstrates how MA system should be integrated with cloud BPMS using proposed approach. Proposed approach is extendable and may be reused for integrating MAs with cloud systems in other domains as well.