Towards modeling real-world aware business processes

Abstract

In this paper we aim at bringing together the Web of Things (WoT) domain with the domain of enterprise business process modeling in order to work towards a Future Internet that includes all layers of networked technology stacks. We suggest introducing new notation concepts to the current business process modeling standards to facilitate modeling WoT aware business processes. We obtain and classify known WoT specific properties of realworld business processes. By means of a sensor based case study we analyze existing business process modeling standards such as Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), Extended Event-driven Process Chain (eEPC) and Unified Modeling Language (UML) in order to extract WoT specific process properties. A final evaluation concludes with the current most fitting process notation for modeling real world processes using WoT technology and suggests extending established approaches by including WoT specific aspects. While the WoT community has clearly identified the need for interoperability with other internet applications, the domain of enterprise business process modeling so far seems to be more reluctant to address and model aspects of the real world. From a business process perspective, many WoT issues such as uncertainty and unreliability of information, highly dynamic federations of networked components, or even the notion of physical entities as inherent parts of the process or activity modeling are not directly reflected as modeling concepts. Categories and Subject DescriptorsIn other words: The "things" in the web of things don't really exist in the enterprise business process modeling world!The research work presented in this paper contributes to overcoming the existing obstacles concerning the integration of WoT-technologies and business processes. It is carried out in the European research project IoT-A 1 that seeks to define a reference architecture for the Future Internet of Things that should allow for bridging the gap between the lower layers of a Future Internet and the higher enterprise process layers. A central outcome within the IoT-A project is the definition of a domain model using [7] as a basis, that describes real-world devices in terms of the services they provide, the distinction between devices and entities of interests, and other aspects of the real-world domain. Real-world services would potentially include properties such as coarse consistency, the importance of place and time and limited accessibility. This paper investigates how the properties of real-world, WoT aware services and the traditional services of the Web of Services (WoS) used for the implementation of business processes differ from one another. The gained properties are classified and ranked regarding their importance of consideration at the level of business process modeling. A detailed analysis shows how the previously defined real-world properties can be modeled by using current BPM notations and highlights the gap to be ...

Towards application development for the internet of things

“…A clear terminology is important, not only for our own research, but also for enabling scientific discourse among researchers, system programmers, as well as domain experts [14,16]. We note that this is not the first such effort; notably Haller [9] has defined the relationship among things, devices, resources, and services.…”

“…In addition to the reasons above, a goal specific to the Internet of Things that a good domain model can satisfy is that of successfully integrating the models of real world things, software, and network, a need highlighted by recent works such as [14] and [16].…”

Formalizing the Software Engineering Process Using a Graphical Software Process Modelling Formalism

“…UML Activity Diagram [24] (for a wider comparative analysis, see [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]), BPMN provides a high level of ease of understanding of its process models. It also offers a comprehensive support of the control-flow and data perspectives.…”

The Things of the Internet of Things in BPMN

“…In order to bring the new IoT element thing to the envisioned BPM environment, we aim to provide a process model that includes the thing element, as a basis to express this new information. There are various Business Process Notations available, but [2] evaluated the industry standard BPMN 2.0 as the most IoT-aware state-of-the-art process modeling approach. The process model of BPMN comes already with a graphical and a machine-readable notation.…”

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