Internet of Things Meets BPM: A Conceptual Integration Framework

摘要

Business process management (BPM) is considered as a powerful technology to design, control, and improve processes. Recently, organizations have started contemplating the value that combining the inter-networking of all kinds of physical devices, i.e., the Internet of Things (IoT) with BPM could bring to an organization. BPM provides intelligent control over IoT devices by integrating and managing devices and data generated by them in business operations. Here, data from IoT devices needs to be analyzed and actions need to be taken based on that data. Since the real world as context of a BPM application changes drastically through the advent of IoT, it is worthwhile to investigate how the enactment of a BPM application changes or must be customized. In this paper, we first describe benefits and necessary adaptions w.r.t. the integration of IoT and BPM systems. Furthermore, we tackle two concrete adaption tasks, i.e., we introduce concepts for IoT enhanced process modeling as well as a technological integration architecture. Both approaches have successfully been evaluated in production industry.