1. Slide 1 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project MOWAHS: Mobile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems Reidar Conradi, Mads Nygård Dept. Computer and Information Science (IDI) NTNU www.mowahs.com Tel +47 73.593444 (rc), +47 73.593470 (mn), Fax +47 73.594466

2. Slide 2 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 3 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 4 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 5 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 6 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project MOWAHS goals (2) G1) Helping to understand and to continuously assess and improve workprocesses in virtual organizations. G2) Providing a flexible, common work environment 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. Slide 7 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 8 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 9 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 10 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project Slide 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. Slide 11 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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. Slide 12 MOWAHS: MObile Work Across Heterogeneous Systems, NFR IKT2010 R&D project 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.