Context-Aware BPM Using IoT-Integrated Context Ontologies and IoT-Enhanced Decision Models

Abstract

IoT (Internet of Things) has the capability of capturing dynamic context from the physical world into the digital world. Context-aware BPM (Business Process Management) should integrate IoT as a key perspective of dynamic context of a business process and to enhance the decision making in a business process. IoT is often used to automate the process execution or integrated in the process model as resources of smart devices and additional concepts. In this way, IoT data is directly used without processing or reasoning with other contextual data to obtain higher-order contextual knowledge, which impairs its potential capability. The context layer and the decision layer are still missing while integrating IoT in BPM to obtain context-awareness. Decisions are still considered within context-aware BPM in a traditional way. This paper provides a separate concern of decisions from the process flow. We propose that the context-aware BPM ecosystem consists of four components which are: context-aware process models, context models, decision models and contextaware process execution. A framework is proposed to connect the IoT infrastructure to the context-aware BPM ecosystem using IoT-integrated ontologies and IoT-enhanced decision models, which enables the capabilities of IoT to make business processes and the decision making involved aware of the dynamic context.

Business process redesign towards IoT-enabled context-awareness: the case of a Chinese bulk port

“…Hence, business users, IT developers, software modules can be considered as different components of the context concept. A model of the CaBPM ecosystem has been proposed in the previous work (Song et al, 2019a), which states that there is mutual adaptation between the business process, the content of which we define to be process models at design time and process execution at run time, and its context, the content of which we define to be the context model, as well as decision models involved in the business process. These four components form the co-evolutionary core of the CaBPM ecosystem (Figure 2), in which context-dependent decisions bridge the gap between the business process and its context, as well as the decision-making and contextual data including IoT data.…”

“…IoT-enabled contextawareness business processes and to obtain context-awareness in BPM. A framework to bridge CaBPM ecosystem and IoT infrastructure is depicted in Figure 3 (Song et al, 2019a).…”

“…Hence, business users, IT developers, software modules can be considered as different components of the context concept. A model of the CaBPM ecosystem has been proposed in the previous work (Song et al. , 2019a), which states that there is mutual adaptation between the business process, the content of which we define to be process models at design time and process execution at run time, and its context, the content of which we define to be the context model, as well as decision models involved in the business process.…”

“…Hence, it is of vital importance to use IoT data integrated in context models to enhance decisions in business processes and to obtain context-awareness in BPM. A framework to bridge CaBPM ecosystem and IoT infrastructure is depicted in Figure 3 (Song et al. , 2019a).…”

Managing business model innovation: an innovative approach towards designing a digital ecosystem and multi-sided platform

“…Digital technologies, such as IoT, can capture the dynamic context of business processes and enhance or automate related decision-making processes. By identifying and linking relevant factors, a traditional business process or entire business model can be transformed into a digital business ecosystem (Song et al, 2019).…”