Sonja Meyer

Internet of things-aware process modeling: integrating iot devices as business process resources

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown in recent years to a huge branch of research: RFID, sensors and actuators as typical IoT devices are increasingly used as resources integrated into new value added applications of the Future Internet and are intelligently combined using standardised software services. While most of the current work on IoT integration focuses on areas of the actual technical implementation, little attention has been given to the integration of the IoT paradigm and its devices coming with native software components as resources in business processes of traditional enterprise resource planning systems. In this paper, we identify and integrate IoT resources as a novel automatic resource type on the business process layer beyond the classical human resource task-centric view of the business process model in order to face expanding resource planning challenges of future enterprise environments.

Towards modeling real-world aware business processes

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 real-world 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.

On IoT-services: Survey, Classification and Enterprise Integration

This paper presents the results of a recent survey we conducted on the usage of services and service oriented architecture (SOA) within Internet of Things (IoT) related public funded projects and the research community, in general. We identified the lack of a coherent definition and classification of IoT services, as it would be necessary to contribute to service science in general. We therefore present a definition of IoT services and classify them based on the relationship to a physical entity and their lifecycle. The usefulness of this is abstraction is then shown on the example of business process modelling and Enterprise SOA integration.

Introducing Entity-Based Concepts to Business Process Modeling

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) that comprises interconnected physical devices such as sensor networks and its technologies like Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is increasingly adopted in many industries and thus becomes highly relevant for process modeling and execution. As BPMN 2.0 does not yet consider the idiosyncrasies of real-world entities we suggest new modeling concepts for a physical entity as well as a sensing task and an actuation task to make BPMN IoT-aware.

The Things of the Internet of Things in BPMN

The component “thing” of the Internet of Things does not yet exist in current business process modeling standards. The “thing” is the essential and central concept of the Internet of Things, and without its consideration we will not be able to model the business processes of the future, which will be able to measure or change states of objects in our real-world environment. The presented approach focuses on integrating the concept of the Internet of Things into the meta-model of the process modeling standard BPMN 2.0 as standard-conform as possible. By a terminological and conceptual delimitation, three components of the standard are examined and compared towards a possible expansion. By implementing the most appropriate solution, the new thing concept becomes usable for modelers, both as a graphical and machine-readable element.

Towards Real World Aware Enterprise Systems - Reflecting the Quality Information of Physical Resources in Services and Processes

In order to facilitate the development of IoT-aware business processes that adapt to real-world context information, we present a novel modeling approach that reflects IoT quality information inherent in physical resources and maps them to the higher layers of enterprise information systems. Quality information is crucial to real-world applications, and is therefore part of standard real-world resource descriptions. Correspondingly, on a service level, quality aspects are referred to as Quality of Service (QoS) and are usually expressed by using Service Level Agreements that are unrelated to the quality information on a resource level. On a process level, quality aspects are currently much less considered, as IoT-aware business processes are still to emerge at a large scale. In order to bridge the gap between physical resources and business process management, we propose to map Quality of Information (QoI) and Quality of Actuation (QoA) common to the resource layer as important, non-functional Internet of Things (IoT) related aspects to the service and process layers in enterprise information systems. By following a bottom up approach, we investigate how standard modeling notations such as USDL and BPMN 2.0 can be integrated and augmented for handling the real world aspects QoI and QoA within IoT-aware business processes. Finally, we exemplify the proposed enhancements by a business process including IoT resources and services.

An Approach for a Mutual Integration of the Web of Things with Business Processes

The vision of a multitude of heterogeneous, connected devices interacting with parts of its physical environment, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), has gained momentum over the last years. For traditional business information systems the integration of the IoT leads to the emergence of new value-added business processes that make use of its representative devices such as RFID, sensors and actuators, as entirely new resources. One promising approach in the IoT domain is a real-world service integration method based on Representational State Transfer (REST) principles expedited by the initiative Web of Things (WoT). The connection of classical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems commonly based on service oriented architectures coming with heavy-weight services and the resource oriented WoT coming with RESTful services for its limited devices is still a complex problem on both sides. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional integration approach of current Business Process Management (BPM)-based ERP systems and the WoT to provide a foundation to connect and analyze legacy systems as well as Future Internet applications. By following a three phase BPM-lifecycle, we investigate how the process metamodel of the industry standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) can cover WoT specific components. Reversely, we examine how existing and useful business process information can be seamlessly included into the WoT respecting its essential architecture and applying a component-based approach.

An End-User Friendly Service Delivery Platform for the Public Sector

We present a service innovation scenario where semantic web services and visual process specification allow public sector workers to easily modify and adapt administrative services and processes, thus responding to new challenges such as the implementation of the European Services Directive and other recent developments. Our use case is based upon a novel Service Delivery Platform developed in the EU FP7 project SOA4All.

A component based approach for the Web of Things

Model Driven Architectures are the holy grail of software engineering. Instead of writing code, developers draw models from the clients specification, which are then compiled into executable code (skeletons). We have taken this principle and applied it to the WoT. With the help of a meta-model tailored for the WoT we are able to build models to simultaneously take care of the physical and virtual aspects of smart devices. These models can then automatically be turned into code skeletons. The emphasis in the meta-model and its associated tools is reusability. Following the software engineering principle of independent reusable and deployable components, the outcome of the meta-model compiler are WoT compliant components.