BPMN Task Instance Streaming for Efficient Micro-task Crowdsourcing Processes

Abstract

Abstract. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for modeling and executing business processes with human or machine tasks. The semantics of tasks is usually discrete: a task has exactly one start event and one end event; for multi-instance tasks, all instances must complete before an end event is emitted. We propose a new task type and streaming connector for crowdsourcing able to run hundreds or thousands of micro-task instances in parallel. The two constructs provide for task streaming semantics that is new to BPMN, enable the modeling and efficient enactment of complex crowdsourcing scenarios, and are applicable also beyond the special case of crowdsourcing. We implement the necessary design and runtime support on top of CrowdFlower, demonstrate the viability of the approach via a case study, and report on a set of runtime performance experiments.

Mobile Cloud Business Process Management System for the Internet of Things

“…The design that hides the detail topology and communication at the edge network may cause the process designer unable to properly define the behaviours and processes of the devices in terms of adding participants, modifying or customising the processes, react to or prevent failures and so on. Further, recent IoT management systems often involve edge nodes as a part of the BPMS in the scenarios such as logistics [22], crowdsourcing processes [26], HVAC system [19], health care services [20], Ambient Assisted Living [27], real-time sensing [28] where mobile and wireless network objects are involved.…”

“…Generally, in this approach, the system relies on the middleware technologies to translate the BP model to the executable code, then send the code to the IoT devices for execution. Particularly, numerous BPMS4IoT frameworks [22,91,92,19,26] have utilised this approach to enable IoT/WSN devices participating in BP execution without the need of embedding complex software middleware components (e.g., workflow engine) on the devices. Figure 6c).…”

“…• makeSense [92,19,26] provides model-to-execution mechanisms for the system integration. It mainly supports three approaches:…”

“…Existing event streaming schemes [116,78,26] were designed for specific scenarios. There is a lack of generic BP model for defining the streaming type activities for both intra-organisational, inter-organisational and edge networks.…”

“…Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has been the most popular approach to the literature studied in this paper. These works include IoT-A [79], VITAL [90], Canracaş et al [91], BPMN4WSN [18], MOPAL [20], SPUs [78], makeSense [92,19,26], uBPMN [80], Dar et al [27]. Although originally, BPMN is only a graphical BP model standard introduced by the Object Management Group (OMG), OMG also introduced the metadata form in XML format.…”