Complex Collaborative Physical Process Management: A Position on the Trinity of BPM, IoT and DA

Part 7: Collaborative Business ProcessesInternational audienceIn the modern economy, we see complex business processes with a physical character executed collaboratively by a set of autonomous business organizations. Examples are international container logistics, integrated supply and manufacturing networks, and collaborative healthcare chains - all of which handle physical objects. Over time, these processes have become more complex, more business-critical, more time-critical, and at the same time heavily mass-customized. This implies that the processes need to be managed more explicitly in an increasingly real-time fashion, with ample attention to individual process cases. To support this kind of processes, no single existing technology class suffices. Therefore, we propose to integrate technologies from the areas of business process management (BPM - to manage the processes), internet of things (IoT - to sense and actuate the physical objects) and distributed analytics (DA - to take the right decisions at the right place in real-time) into a trinity. We illustrate our position with an example from the domain of container logistics

Dynamic Process Synchronization using BPMN 2.0 to Support Buffering and (Un)Bundling in Manufacturing

The complexity of manufacturing processes is increasing due to the production variety implied by mass customization of products. In this context, manufacturers strive to achieve flexibility in their operational processes. Business Process Management (BPM) can help integration, orchestration and automation of these manufacturing operations to reach this flexibility. BPMN is a promising notation for modeling and supporting the enactment of manufacturing processes. However, processes in the manufacturing domain include the flow of physical objects (materials and products) apart from information flow. Buffering, bundling and unbundling of physical objects are three commonly encountered patterns in manufacturing processes, which require fine-grained synchronization in the enactment of multiple process instances. Unfortunately, BPMN lacks strong support for this kind of dynamic synchronization as process instances are modeled and executed from a single, isolated point of view. This paper presents a mechanism based on BPMN 2.0 that enables process modelers to define synchronization points by using the concept of recipes. The recipe system uses a dynamic correlation scheme to control many-to-many interactions among process instances to implement required inter-instance synchronizations. We formally describe the involved BPMN patterns, implement and evaluate them in a manufacturing scenario in the high-tech media printing domain.</p