Towards Business Processes Orchestrating the Physical Enterprise with Wireless Sensor Networks

The industrial adoption of wireless sensor net- works (WSNs) is hampered by two main factors. First, there is a lack of integration of WSNs with business process modeling languages and back-ends. Second, programming WSNs is still challenging as it is mainly performed at the operating system level. To this end, we provide makeSense: a unified programming framework and a compilation chain that, from high-level business process specifications, generates code ready for deployment on WSN nodes

Modeling IoT-aware Business Processes - A State of the Art Report

This research report presents an analysis of the state of the art of modeling Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes. IOT links the physical world to the digital world. Traditionally, we would find information about events and processes in the physical world in the digital world entered by humans and humans using this information to control the physical world. In the IoT paradigm, the physical world is equipped with sensors and actuators to create a direct link with the digital world. Business processes are used to coordinate a complex environment including multiple actors for a common goal, typically in the context of administrative work. In the past few years, we have seen research efforts on the possibilities to model IoT- aware business processes, extending process coordination to real world entities directly. This set of research efforts is relatively small when compared to the overall research effort into the IoT and much of the work is still in the early research stage. To create a basis for a bridge between IoT and BPM, the goal of this report is to collect and analyze the state of the art of existing frameworks for modeling IoT-aware business processes.Comment: 42 page

makeSense: Simplifying the Integration of Wireless Sensor Networks into Business Processes

A wide gap exists between the state of the art in developing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) software and current practices concerning the design, execution, and maintenance of business processes. WSN software is most often developed based on low-level OS abstractions, whereas business process development leverages high-level languages and tools. This state of affairs places WSNs at the fringe of industry. The makeSense system addresses this problem by simplifying the integration of WSNs into business processes. Developers use BPMN models extended with WSN-specific constructs to specify the application behavior across both traditional business process execution environments and the WSN itself, which is to be equipped with application-specific software. We compile these models into a high-level intermediate language—also directly usable by WSN developers—and then into OS-specific deployment-ready binaries. Key to this process is the notion of meta-abstraction, which we define to capture fundamental patterns of interaction with and within the WSN. The concrete realization of meta-abstractions is application-specific; developers tailor the system configuration by selecting concrete abstractions out of the existing codebase or by providing their own. Our evaluation of makeSense shows that i) users perceive our approach as a significant advance over the state of the art, providing evidence of the increased developer productivity when using makeSense; ii) in large-scale simulations, our prototype exhibits an acceptable system overhead and good scaling properties, demonstrating the general applicability of makeSense; and, iii) our prototype—including the complete tool-chain and underlying system support—sustains a real-world deployment where estimates by domain specialists indicate the potential for drastic reductions in the total cost of ownership compared to wired and conventional WSN-based solutions

Modeling, Executing and Monitoring IoT-Driven Business Rules in BPMN and DMN: Current Support and Challenges

The involvement of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Business Process Management (BPM) solutions is continuously increasing. While BPM enables the modeling, implementation, execution, monitoring, and analysis of business processes, IoT fosters the collection and exchange of data over the Internet. By enriching BPM solutions with real-world IoT data both process automation and process monitoring can be improved. Furthermore, IoT data can be utilized during process execution to realize IoT-driven business rules that consider the state of the physical environment. The aggregation of low-level IoT data into processrelevant, high-level IoT data is a paramount step towards IoT-driven business processes and business rules respectively. In this context, Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) provide support to model, execute, and monitor IoTdriven business rules, but some challenges remain. This paper derives the challenges that emerge when modeling, executing, and monitoring IoT-driven business rules using BPMN 2.0 and DMN standards

Towards a Comprehensive BPMN Extension for Modeling IoT-Aware Processes in Business Process Models

Internet of Thing (IoT) devices enable the collection and exchange of data over the Internet, whereas Business Process Management (BPM) is concerned with the analysis, discovery, implementation, execution, monitoring, and evolution of business processes. By enriching BPM systems with IoT capabilities, data from the real world can be captured and utilized during process execution in order to improve online process monitoring and data-driven decision making. Furthermore, this integration fosters prescriptive process monitoring, e.g., by enabling IoT-driven process adaptions when deviations between the digital process and the one actually happening in the real world occur. As a prerequisite for exploiting these benefits, IoT-related aspects of business processes need to be modeled. To enable the use of sensors, actuators, and other IoT objects in combination with process models, we introduce a BPMN 2.0 extension with IoT-related artifacts and events. We provide a first evaluation of this extension by applying it in two case studies for modeling of IoT-aware processes

Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study

[EN] The Internet of Things (IoT) enables to connect the physical world to digital business processes (BP). By using the IoT, a BP can, e.g.: 1) take into account real-world data to take more informed business decisions, and 2) automate and/or improve BP tasks. To achieve these benefits, the integration of IoT and BPs needs to be successful. The first step to this end is to support the modeling of IoT-enhanced BPs. Although numerous researchers have studied this subject, it is unclear what is the current state of the art in terms of current modeling solutions and gaps. In this work, we carry out a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) to find out how current solutions are modelling IoT into business processes. After studying 600 papers, we identified and analyzed in depth a total of 36 different solutions. In addition, we report on some important issues that should be addressed in the near future, such as, for instance the lack of standardization.This research has been funded by Internal Funds KU Leuven (Interne Fondsen KU Leuven) and the financial support of the Spanish State Research Agency under the project TIN2017-84094-R and co-financed with ERDF.Torres Bosch, MV.; Serral, E.; Valderas, P.; Pelechano Ferragud, V.; Grefen, P. (2020). Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study. IEEE. 221-230. https://doi.org/10.1109/CBI49978.2020.00031S22123

A systematic literature review on IoT-aware business process modeling views, requirements and notations

The Internet of things has been adopted in several sectors both influencing how people work and enhancing organizations' business processes. This resulted in the rise of relevant research topics such as IoT-aware business processes. The modeling of these processes makes it possible to better understand working scenarios and to support the adoption of model-driven development approaches for IoT-aware and process-oriented software systems. Since much research has been performed on this topic, a better awareness of the current status is needed. This paper reports a systematic literature review to develop a map on modeling notations for IoT-aware business processes. The survey mainly adopts an academic point of view, resulting in the detailed analysis of 84 research works from the leading computer science digital libraries. The output of the review is in the form of schemes and reflections. In particular, our research aims to shed light on (1) the relevant modeling views referring to different types of IoT-aware business processes; (2) the IoT requirements supported by the modeling notations; and (3) the modeling notations proposed and/or adopted to model IoT-aware business processes. Finally, our research work highlights possible future research lines needing further investigations

Using BPMN to model Internet of Things behavior within business process

Whereas, traditionally, business processes use the Internet of Things (IoTs) as a distributed source of information, the increase of computational capabilities of IoT devices provides them with the means to also execute parts of the business logic, reducing the amount of exchanged data and central processing. Current approaches based on Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) already support modelers to define both business processes and IoT devices behavior at the same level of abstraction. However, they are not restricted to standard BPMN elements and they generate IoT device specific low-level code. The work we present in this paper exclusivelly uses standard BPMN to define central as well as IoT behavior of business processes. In addition, the BPMN that defines the IoT behavior is translated to a neutral-platform programming code. The deployment and execution environments use Web services to support the communication between the process execution engine and IoT devices

Using BPMN to model Internet of Things behavior within business process

Whereas, traditionally, business processes use the Internet of Things (IoTs) as a distributed source of information, the increase of computational capabilities of IoT devices provides them with the means to also execute parts of the business logic, reducing the amount of exchanged data and central processing. Current approaches based on Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) already support modelers to define both business processes and IoT devices behavior at the same level of abstraction. However, they are not restricted to standard BPMN elements and they generate IoT device specific low-level code. The work we present in this paper exclusivelly uses standard BPMN to define central as well as IoT behavior of business processes. In addition, the BPMN that defines the IoT behavior is translated to a neutral-platform programming code. The deployment and execution environments use Web services to support the communication between the process execution engine and IoT devices