Towards the development of semantically enabled flexible process monitoring systems

摘要

In current business and enterprise environment, the most common processes are structured and well-documented, but there is another important category of processes, also referred to as being 'flexible' or 'less-structured', because their execution is not strictly enforced by an external system. The main objective of this article is the design of a semantically enabled system capable of monitoring and analysing flexible or transient processes that typically occur in enterprise environments, in which the human factor plays a very important role in the execution and planning of activities. In order to facilitate the development of such a system, we provide a framework for the management of processes that also involve physical activities thus extending the scope of business process management into physical systems. This undertaking involves the integration of results from the emerging Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) research field and from several other areas of research such as the area of and activity recognition, plan recognition, process mining, etc.