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

Co-location specification for IoT-aware collaborative business processes

Technologies from the Internet of Things (IoT) create new possibilities to directly connect physical processes in the ‘real’ world to digital business processes in the administrative world. Objects manipulated in the real world (the ‘things’ of IoT) can directly provide data to digital processes, and these processes can directly influence the behavior of the objects. An increasing body of work exists on specifying and executing the interface between the physical and the digital worlds for individual objects. But many real-life business scenarios require that the handling of multiple physical objects is synchronized by digital processes. An example is the cross-docking of sea containers at ports: here we have containers, ships, cranes and trucks that are all ‘things’ in the IoT sense. Cross-docking processes only work when these ‘things’ are properly co-located in time and space. Therefore, we propose an approach to specify this co-location in multi-actor, IoT-aware business process models, based on the concept of spheres. We discuss consistency checking between co-location spheres and illustrate our approach with container cross-docking processes

Ontology-based data integration in multi-disciplinary engineering environments: a review

Today’s industrial production plants are complex mechatronic systems. In the course of the production plant lifecycle, engineers from a variety of disciplines (e.g., mechanics, electronics, automation) need to collaborate in multi-disciplinary settings that are characterized by heterogeneity in terminology, methods, and tools. This collaboration yields a variety of engineering artifacts that need to be linked and integrated, which on the technical level is reflected in the need to integrate heterogeneous data. Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontology-based data integration (OBDI), are promising to tackle this challenge that has attracted strong interest from the engineering research community. This interest has resulted in a growing body of literature that is dispersed across the Semantic Web and Automation System Engineering research communities and has not been systematically reviewed so far. We address this gap with a survey reflecting on OBDI applications in the context of Multi-Disciplinary Engineering Environment (MDEE). To this end, we analyze and compare 23 OBDI applications from both the Semantic Web and the Automation System Engineering research communities. Based on this analysis, we (i) categorize OBDI variants used in MDEE, (ii) identify key problem context characteristics, (iii) compare strengths and limitations of OBDI variants as a function of problem context, and (iv) provide recommendation guidelines for the selection of OBDI variants and technologies for OBDI in MDEE.status: publishe

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

Co-location specification for IoT-aware collaborative business processes

Technologies from the Internet of Things (IoT) create new possibilities to directly connect physical processes in the ‘real’ world to digital business processes in the administrative world. Objects manipulated in the real world (the ‘things’ of IoT) can directly provide data to digital processes, and these processes can directly influence the behavior of the objects. An increasing body of work exists on specifying and executing the interface between the physical and the digital worlds for individual objects. But many real-life business scenarios require that the handling of multiple physical objects is synchronized by digital processes. An example is the cross-docking of sea containers at ports: here we have containers, ships, cranes and trucks that are all ‘things’ in the IoT sense. Cross-docking processes only work when these ‘things’ are properly co-located in time and space. Therefore, we propose an approach to specify this co-location in multi-actor, IoT-aware business process models, based on the concept of spheres. We discuss consistency checking between co-location spheres and illustrate our approach with container cross-docking processes