Through our experience working with service providers with expanding mobile work forces, we have created a suite of WorkForce Management tools, ideas, concepts, and applications called MAST - Mobile Application Studio Toolkit. MAST is a Mobile Application Designer. It allows users to define tasks that should be performed in some defined flow/logic by the technician and the corresponding screens and data fields for Input and Output. MAST supports all presentation widgets and data abstractions needed to support Mobile Applications. The output of MAST is a set of data structures and XML files that help drive the application and the integration to the back-end at run-time.

The software architecture consists of three software components:

Mobile Application Studio & Toolkit
This is the Application Designer. It allows users to define tasks that should be performed in some defined flow/logic by the technician and the corresponding screens and data fields for Input and Output. MAST supports all presentation widgets and data abstractions needed to support Mobile Applications. The output of MAST is a set of data structures and XML files that help drive the application and the integration to the back-end at run-time.

Mobile Application Controller
This is a run-time controller that uses the output of MAST to manage the application at runtime in conjunction with the Application Loader. MAC and MAL communicate wirelessly with each other and provide uniquely addressable nodes in the network of devices. The communication supported includes SMS and interfaces with several multi-protocol wireless communication middleware.

Mobile Application Loader
This is a run-time server side component that manages and loads MAST outputs to mobile devices and at the same time manages the communication of messages between the mobile devices and the back-end servers/applications.