Use Your Best Device! Enabling Device Changes at Runtime

The usage of different computing devices, like desktop computers or smartphones, in our everyday lifes increases continuously. Moreover, smart watches and other wearables are ready to accompany us in our daily habits. As a consequence, applications are developed for a variety of different computing devices, in order to give users the freedom to choose a device that really fits their current situation. If this situation changes, a different device may become more suitable than the chosen one. In most cases, applications do not support changing the executing device at runtime, since this is usually not considered at design time and would require the transferal of the current state. In this paper, we present an approach to define device changes for process-driven applications. To this extent, we enrich process models with deployment information, which allows specifying where it should be possible to change the device while keeping the application’s state. Additionally, we have adapted a process engine to support the execution of these enriched process models. Thereby, we take a further step towards human-centric BPM that enables users to use their most suitable device.