Mobile Agents for Business Process Management Support in Cloud Computing Environments
2013
Antons Mislēvičs

Defending
04.03.2013. 14:30, Datorzinātnes un informācijas tehnoloģijas fakultāte, Meža ielā 1/3, 202. auditorija

Supervisor
Jānis Grundspeņķis

Reviewers
Uldis Sukovskis, Jānis Bičevskis, Kuldar Taveter

Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming more popular in recent years. BPM is a set of concepts, methods and techniques that support analysis, implementation and management of business processes in organization. Historically business processes more often are implemented using traditional approach: employees are familiarized with business processes that they are implementing and which are described in internal policies and procedures. However, recently more companies start using specialized information systems that support BPM. Such systems are called Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Analyzing future of BPM researchers agree that cloud computing environments will be used to adopt BPM applications. Cloud environments allow organizations to reduce initial implementation costs and use BPMS as a service (Software as a Service – SaaS). As any successful BPMS implementation requires establishing a solid integration of business processes with existing line of business applications (LOB) and organizational data sources, moving BPMS to the cloud puts the focus on “cloud to on-premises” integration questions. Similar questions are addressed in many studies around integrating SaaS applications with on-premises systems and data sources. Nevertheless, integrating cloud BPMS with on-premises LOB applications has some specific scenarios and requirements that cannot be effectively addressed by using existing technologies and patterns. The thesis describes how cloud BPMS integration challenges are solved using mobile agents (MA) technology. During the research specific cloud BPMS integration requirements are identified and the concept of MA system is proposed to address these. Analyzing existing MA systems several issues are identified that make using these systems inappropriate in cloud BPMS integration scenarios. To solve identified issues a new concept of workflow based MA system is proposed. The thesis describes underlying concepts of developed MA system, implementation details and results of evaluation. Main results of the thesis have been presented at 4 international conferences and are reflected in 5 scientific publications. The thesis includes introduction, 4 chapters and conclusions. It contains 164 pages, 62 figures and 4 tables in the main text, 219 titles large bibliography and 4 appendixes.


Keywords
SaaS Integration, Business Process Management Systems, Mobile Agents

Mislēvičs, Antons. Mobile Agents for Business Process Management Support in Cloud Computing Environments. PhD Thesis. Rīga: [RTU], 2013. 164 p.

Publication language
Latvian (lv)
The Scientific Library of the Riga Technical University.
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