Towards a Comprehensive BPMN Extension for Modeling IoT-Aware Processes in Business Process Models

Internet of Thing (IoT) devices enable the collection and exchange of data over the Internet, whereas Business Process Management (BPM) is concerned with the analysis, discovery, implementation, execution, monitoring, and evolution of business processes. By enriching BPM systems with IoT capabilities, data from the real world can be captured and utilized during process execution in order to improve online process monitoring and data-driven decision making. Furthermore, this integration fosters prescriptive process monitoring, e.g., by enabling IoT-driven process adaptions when deviations between the digital process and the one actually happening in the real world occur. As a prerequisite for exploiting these benefits, IoT-related aspects of business processes need to be modeled. To enable the use of sensors, actuators, and other IoT objects in combination with process models, we introduce a BPMN 2.0 extension with IoT-related artifacts and events. We provide a first evaluation of this extension by applying it in two case studies for modeling of IoT-aware processes.