BPMNE4IoT: A Framework for Modeling, Executing and Monitoring IoT-Driven Processes

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a variety of smart applications, including smart home, smart manufacturing, and smart city. By enhancing Business Process Management Systems with IoT capabilities, the execution and monitoring of business processes can be significantly improved. Providing a holistic support for modeling, executing and monitoring IoT-driven processes, however, constitutes a challenge. Existing process modeling and process execution languages, such as BPMN 2.0, are unable to fully meet the IoT characteristics (e.g., asynchronicity and parallelism) of IoT-driven processes. In this article, we üresent BPMNE4IoT—A holistic framework for modeling, executing and monitoring IoT-driven processes. We introduce various artifacts and events based on the BPMN 2.0 metamodel that allow realizing the desired IoT awareness of business processes. The framework is evaluated along two real-world scenarios from two different domains. Moreover, we present a user study for comparing BPMNE4IoT and BPMN 2.0. In particular, this study has confirmed that the BPMNE4IoT framework facilitates the support of IoT-driven processes.

A User Study on Modeling IoT-Aware Processes with BPMN 2.0

“…An IoT-aware process model utilizes IoT devices and maps IoT behavior to process activities and events, respectively [8]. For example, an IoT-aware order process involves IoT devices, describes the behavior of these IoT devices, and contains all activities to process the order.…”

“…There are several modeling notations for business processes, such as Petri nets, eventdriven process chains (EPCs), Unified Modeling Language (UML), and business process modeling and notation (BPMN). The latter is the de facto standard for modeling business processes in the BPM domain, and is broadly used in both industry and academia [8]. Researchers [3,6,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] have contended that BPMN 2.0 possesses capabilities that allow for the modeling of IoT-aware business processes as well.…”

“…Investigating the user perspective, however, is important as it makes a crucial contribution to the practical applicability and acceptance of modeling approaches. While the expert perspective provides valuable insights into theoretical concepts and technical aspects, the domain expert perspective reflects the reality of those who will actually apply these models [8,10,25]. Consequently, user studies are needed to evaluate the various approaches proposed to integrate IoT aspects and BPMN 2.0.…”

“…The Internet of Things (IoT) is characterized by a network of interconnected physical objects equipped with actuators, sensors, software, hardware, and network connections [3,8,9,42,53]. These interconnected IoT devices facilitate the collection, processing, and utilization of data from the physical world, enabling an impact on the physical environment as well as communication with other smart entities.…”

“…Business process management (BPM), in turn, aims to continuously improve processes to increase their performance, quality, and efficiency [8][9][10]. BPM involves a series of steps that make up the BPM lifecycle, including the analysis, design, modeling, automation, monitoring, and evolution of business processes [10].…”