IoT meets BPM: a bidirectional communication architecture for IoT-aware process execution

Abstract

Business processes are frequently executed within application systems that involve humans, computer systems as well as objects of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, the usage of IoT technology for system supported process execution is still constrained by the absence of a common system architecture that manages the communication between both worlds. In this paper, we introduce an integrated approach for IoT-aware business process execution that exploits IoT for BPM by providing IoT data in a process-compatible way, providing an IoT data provenance framework, considering IoT data for interaction in a pre-defined process model, and providing wearable user interfaces with context-specific IoT data provision. The approach has been implemented on top of contemporary BPM modeling concepts and system technology. The introduced technique has evaluated extensively in different use cases in industry.

Towards IoT-driven Process Event Log Generation for Conformance Checking in Smart Factories

“…Our framework is grounded in CEP, which enables the live (online) analysis of high volume data streams from various sources and features rich mechanisms to correlate, aggregate, filter, map and process events from multiple streams to detect patterns of event occurrences and derive complex events from these analyses via data fusion [14]. CEP has also been applied in the context of IoT [21], [32] and BPM [8], [10], [11], [33] for deriving higher level events from IoT data. As the detection of process events from IoT sensors is not always straightforward and unambiguous [1], we propose to go through multiple stages within our framework: Activity & Event Detection; Activity & Event Refinement; Event Log Generation.…”

“…Despite recent research efforts having contributed to advance the integration of IoT and BPM technologies (e. g., [8]- [11]), IoT technology is not readily integrated into industrial-strength BPM systems [1]. Indeed, events generated from IoT sensors (i) do not directly correspond to meaningful process activities and (ii) do not carry information about process instances, and (iii) IoT entities and processes are rarely represented in an explicit way in and through process models.…”

Using Physical Factory Simulation Models for Business Process Management Research

“…Related research addresses the application of BPM in smart environments such as smart logistics [2,16], smart health [7] and emergency management [14], smart homes [25] as well as smart factories [24,28,13,15]. The work by Mangler et al presents a general discussion of applying BPM technologies in the context of Industry 4.0 [13].…”

“…The work by Mangler et al presents a general discussion of applying BPM technologies in the context of Industry 4.0 [13]. An approach for IoT-aware process execution of industrial maintenance processes is presented by Schönig et al in [24]. They propose an architecture to integrate IoT data into business processes to determine how and when certain work steps should be carried out by production workers.…”

IoT-Based Activity Recognition for Process Assistance in Human-Robot Disaster Response

“…The presented system uses a body area network, image data of the process environment and feedback from the executing workers in case of uncertainties. In [23] an architecture is proposed that integrates IoT and BPM. The authors present a provenance framework for IoT data and consider IoT objects in the process model.…”