A Mobile Agent Approach to Lightweight Process Workflow

The Programming Systems Lab at Columbia University has investigated software process modeling and enactment since its inception in the mid-1980s, initially in the Marvel project. In the early to mid-90s, we extended to cross-organizational processes operating over the Internet, in Oz and OzWeb. The successive prototype frameworks we developed and demonstrated were used on a daily basis in-house to maintain, deploy and monitor their own components, APIs and user interfaces. The new process technology first presented here is broadly based on our decade of research on and experimentation with architecting and using such prototype services and software development processes targeted to Internet/Web middleware and applications, but reflects a major departure from our own (and others') previous directions. In particular, current process and workflow systems, including our own, are often too rigid for open-ended creative intellectual work, unable to rapidly adapt either the models or the enactment to situational context and/or user role. On the other hand, the process/workflow ideal implies a flexible mechanism for composition and coordination of information system components. We now present our in-progress development of rehostable lightweight mobile agents for on-the-fly process construction, adaptation and evolution, system reconfiguration, and knowledge propagation

Process-based Software Tweaking with Mobile Agents

We describe an approach based upon software process technology to on-the-fly monitoring, redeployment, reconfiguration, and in general adaptation of distributed software applications, in short 'software tweaking'. We choose the term tweaking to refer to modifications in structure and behavior that can be made to individual components, as well as sets thereof, or the overall target system configuration, such as adding, removing or substituting components, while the system is running and without bringing it down. The goal of software tweaking is manifold: supporting run-time software composition, enforcing adherence to requirements, ensuring uptime and quality of service of mission-critical systems, recovering from and preventing faults, seamless system upgrading, etc. Our approach involves dispatching and coordinating software agents - named Worklets - via a process engine, since successful tweaking of a complex distributed software system often requires the concerted action of multiple agents on multiple components. The software tweaking process must incorporate and decide upon knowledge about the specifications and architecture of the target software, as well as Worklets capabilities. Software tweaking is correlated to a variety of other software processes - such as configuration management, deployment, validation and evolution - and allows to address at run time a number of related concerns that are normally dealt with only at development time

WWW-based Collaboration Environments with Distributed Tool Services

We have developed an architecture and realization of a framework for hypermedia collaboration environments that support purposeful work by orchestrated teams. The hypermedia represents all plausible multimedia artifacts concerned with the collaborative task(s) at hand that can be placed or generated on-line, from application-specific materials (e.g., source code, chip layouts, blueprints) to formal documentation to digital library resources to informal email and chat transcripts. The environment capabilities include both internal (hypertext) and external (link server) links among these artifacts, which can be added incrementally as useful connections are discovered; project-specific hypermedia search and browsing; automated construction of artifacts and hyperlinks according to the semantics of the group and individual tasks and the overall process workflow; application of tools to the artifacts; and collaborative work for geographically dispersed teams. We present a general architectur..