Process over Things (PoT): An Ontology Based Approach for IoT-Aware Business Processes

IoT-aware business processes are gaining momentum as part of an effort to exploit the potential of IoT technology in the business process management field. The conventional lifecycle of a business process (BP) consists of several phases, from modeling and analysis down to implementation, monitoring and optimization. The availability of widely used standard notations for BP modeling, such as BPMN, allows business analysts to specify their BPs and get the corresponding implementations in an effective and largely automated way. Introducing IoT technologies from the BP design phase proves to bring significant improvements in terms of BP efficiency but also difficulties, when it comes to deal with the complexity and heterogeneity of such technologies at BP modeling time. This paper proposes an approach, named Process over Things (PoT), that aims at overcoming such difficulties by using a standardized ontology to deal with IoT interaction at BP modeling and design time. The proposed approach introduces a BPMN extension to explicitly address the IoT ontology in the BPMN model, yet being independent of the specific ontology implementation. A technology named PoT Broker is also introduced to fill the gap between the BP execution platform and the IoT devices access layer. The PoT Broker also obtains a significant level of automation when implementing IoT-aware BPs making use of a specific IoT ontology. The paper describes the architecture of the PoT approach and illustrates its application to a case study dealing with a weather alert system.