SUPPORT OF SMART WORK PROCESSES IN CONTEXT RICH ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

The evolution of mobile and ubiquitous technologies gives promises for computational services and resources to support and influence work processes planned or performed in physical work environments. Such support should optimally provide the workers with a safer work environment for both the environment itself and the workers. The extended support can give more economic and optimal work processes through proactive and situated planning and execution. We introduce the concept of a smart work process to capture adaptive and context-aware process support. This combination of ubiquitous computing and workflow defines a new research direction to be investigated. This paper elaborates on research challenges related to how smart work processes can be supported. We present and discuss general cases where context information or change in context information influences mobile work activities. Finally, we propose a framework for modelling smart work processes, and present a high-level architecture to support smart work processes.