The Internet of Things Meets Business Process Management: A Manifesto

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges and intersections from a research and practitioner's point of view in terms of complex software systems development.How IoT can benefit from BPM? Let us consider a complex system with multiple components interacting within a smart environment being aware of the components' locations, movements, and interactions. Such a system can be a smart factory with autonomous robots, a retirement home with connected residents, or, at a larger scale, a smart city. While the parties in the system can track the movements of each component and also relate multiple components' behaviors to each other, they do not know the components' agendas. Often their interactions are based on habits, i.e., routine low-level processes, which represent recurring tasks. Some of these routines are more time and cost critical than others, some may be dangerous or endanger others, and some may just be inefficient or superfluous. Knowing their agendas, their goals, and their procedures can enable a better basis for planning, execution, and safety.

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

“…The combination of BPM and IoT has already gained some attention in research and development [3,6,12,21]. An example application domain is collaborative transport and logistics [14].…”

“…An example application domain is collaborative transport and logistics [14]. An analysis of potential benefits and important challenges has been published [3]. Analytics is mentioned in this analysis, but distributed analytics is not positioned explicitly as a third required technology domain here, however, to complement BPM and IoT.…”

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

“…These sensor data are obtained from sensing devices, which can communicate over communication networks, including the Internet, i.e. the Internet of Things (IoT) [8]. Given the set of available activities, we can use machine learning to automatically recognize the ongoing activity from fine-grained sensor data acquired from UGV's on-board sensor unit.…”

Conformance Checking of a Longwall Shearer Operation Based on Low-Level Events

“…BPM use various sources of information about the processes. One of them, especially in industrial installation, is Internet of Things (IoT), defined as a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet [13]. Process management requires an adequate amount of information as a base.…”

“…In changeable market conditions it is not enough to use only historical data from traditional repositories (e.g., databases and data warehouses), but there is a need to use and analyse the up-to-dated data. In this context, IoT data, such as events, delivered via in-memory databases or complex event processing can be useful [13]. On the other hand, it can be pointed that events generated from IoT sensors do not directly correspond to meaningful process activities or process instance, and IoT entities and processes are rarely represented in an explicit way in and through process models [14].…”