MOWAHS motivation (1)

1. MOWAHS:Mobile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems Reidar Conradi, Mads NygårdDept. Computer and Information Science (IDI)NTNU www.mowahs.comTel +47 73.593444 (rc), +47 73.593470 (mn), Fax +47 73.594466

2. MOWAHS motivation (1) • Applications: nomadism, virtual organizations • 300 mill. mobile phones in Jan. 2000, 3 bill. in 2005 and 10% with powerful PCs/PDAs? • Entry ticket to become a global (virtual?) company: reduced by factor 100 in recent years. • Enormous dynamics: 3C convergence, liberalization. • New work modes: RAD, nomadic, 100% on-line. • Technology: mobility, agents, ... • “Deluge”: www, IP, Java, CORBA, XML, applets / servlets / displets, agents = active html pages?, BSCW tool, … • E.g. XML used for sending electricity bills to bank, XML/Java tools to make graphical editors.

3. MOWAHS motivation (2) • The new network economy: international companies, managers, developers, products, markets. • The industry: uses the new IT (or else it dies), but also reinforces the same technology. • UMTS: • ”UMTS is a set of services which we cannot imagine today, with a technology that does not yet exist, for user needs which we don’t yet know”.--- Juha Rupeli of Nokia, chairman.

4. MOWAHS motivation (3) • Some challenges: • How to support both fixed and portable PCs / PDAs? • How to support different and varying connectivity? • How to federate heterogeneous devices, tools, data? • How to effectively support work on mobile platforms? • How to fast and reliably build / evolve such support? • How to asses the impact on humans / virt. organizations? • Piggy-back on existing technologies and solutions: • CAGIS: Multiagent architecture for prosesses / transactions. • CAGIS: Cooperating workspaces and meeting places. • Other: groupware, agents, XML, multimedia, UMTS, WfM process interaction standard, ...

5. MOWAHS: Mobile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems (1) • Newly accepted NFR basic R&D project, 2001-04. • Sw.eng. and database groups at IDI: • 2 IDI teachers: Reidar Conradi, Mads Nygård. • 2 PhD students: Carl-Fredrik Sørensen, Hien Nam Le • 2 postdocs: Alf Inge Wang, Heri Ramampiaro. • Budget: 5 mill. kr totally. • Outspring from CAGIS project in 1997-2001. • Support nomadic computing over heterogeneous platforms: process and transaction support. • Internationalization, coop. with Telenor(?), ...

6. MOWAHS goals (2) • G1) Helping to understand and to continuously assess and improve workprocesses in virtual organizations. • G2) Providing a flexible, common workenvironment to execute and share real workprocesses and their artifacts, applicable on a variety of electronic devices (from big servers to small PDAs). • G3)Disseminating results to colleagues, students, companies, and community at large.

7. MOWAHS approach, iterative (3) • Design a flexible work environment for virtual organizations using heterogeneous devices, with support for processes and their artifacts and transactions. • Implement a testbed for process/transaction support for virtual organizations, using XML-based and mobile agents. • Use real rqmts/scenarios to evaluate the above, e.g. on software development and net-based education. 25% on empirical work.

8. MOWAHS results (4) • R1) A XML-formalism to describe/execute federated and heterogeneous processes and coop. Workspaces/transactions (G2). • R2) A simple set of tools to support the above, based on agent technology (G2). • R3) A set of scenarios with defined work models, using above formalisms/tools (G1). • R4) A body of experiences from empirical studies of such technologies (G1). • R5) Presentation material, courses (G3).

9. MOWAHS: Problem context (5) • Distributed and heterogeneous environments • Manage people working: • Different places • Different times • Different tools • Different processes and data • Organisations divided into autonomous sub-organisations • Plus the new IT opportunities ...

10. MOWAHS Technical Motivation (6) • Problems with traditional process / workflow / groupware architectures: • Too centralized • Too homogenous models • Hard to change tools and models • Need open-ended spectrum of cooperative process tools • No integration of data access and process support • Traditional transaction models / data accessing too stiff • Solution 1: Agent-based architectures. • Solution 2: Novel transaction models. • Solution 3: Use XML, Java, ...

11. MOWAHS challenges • Move to mobile, not just distributed setting. • Allow different process / groupware formalisms/tools locally, i.e. federation. • Couple transaction support to e.g. UML data model. • Try out on realistic scenarios: • Network-based education, the mobile student • Virtual teams in sw.eng. (ourselves, students, industry?) • => Cooperate with others on solutions and applications!!

12. Possibilities for joint activities • MUNIN: • Offer method support for developing multimedia / mobile applications wrt. process / transaction support. • Test out on students / developers. • PATT/Parlay: similar, both for applications and platforms. • HiA’s “The mobile student”: similar + applying such technologies/applications on own students. • INCO: Use MOWAHS as testbed.