Mobile Agents for Integrating Cloud-Based Business Processes with On-Premises Systems and Devices

Business Process Management Systems (BPM systems) are used to control, analyze and manage business processes in organizations. BPM systems help to reduce the amount of administrative effort and focus on the processes which add value. Nowadays moving towards cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture some additional requirements for successful BPM implementation are identified. One of the main challenges is how to integrate SaaS BPM systems with existing on-premises systems, data sources and devices. In this paper mobile agents are proposed as the technology addressing this new challenge. A mobile agent is a composition of computer software and data which is able to migrate from one device to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination device. The paper starts with an overview of SaaS BPM and existing approaches addressing SaaS integration challenges. Then the concept of mobile agents is described and the idea of how mobile agents may be used in SaaS BPM integration scenarios is presented. The paper is continued by a comparison of widely used integration approaches with proposed mobile agents based mechanism. Finally a newly proposed architecture is presented in a prototype outlining its advantages and proposing directions for future research