Bridging the gap between business processes and IoT

Abstract

This paper discusses a novel way of making business processes and Internet of Things (IoT) work together. Indeed each "suffers" from many limitations that the other could help address them and vice versa. On the one hand, business processes are known for capturing organizations' best practices when satisfying users' demands but do not have the capabilities of controlling the physical surrounding that comprises millions of devices/things. On the other hand, IoT is known for provisioning contextualized services to users thanks to millions of devices/things but does not have the capabilities of making these devices/things collaborate. The paper presents a framework to support the collaboration of business processes and IoT. This collaboration is exemplified with 2 types of processes referred as thing-aware processes (TaP) and process-of-things (PoT). A system illustrating the development of PoT is presented in the paper as well.