A Model Based Framework for IoT-Aware Business Process Management

IoT-aware Business Processes (BPs) that exchange data with Internet of Things (IoT) devices, briefly referred to as IoT-aware BPs, are gaining momentum in the BPM field. Introducing IoT technologies from the early stages of the BP development process requires dealing with the complexity and heterogeneity of such technologies at design and analysis time. This paper analyzes widely used IoT frameworks and ontologies to introduce a BPMN extension that improves the expressiveness of relevant BP modeling notations and allows an appropriate representation of IoT devices from both an architectural and a behavioral perspective. In the BP management field, the use of simulation-based approaches is recognized as an effective technology for analyzing BPs. Simulation models need to be parameterized according to relevant properties of the process under study. Unfortunately, such parameters may change during the process operational life, thus making the simulation model invalid with respect to the actual process behavior. To ease the analysis of IoT-aware BPs, this paper introduces a model-driven method for the automated development of digital twins of actual business processes. The proposed method also exploits data retrieved by IoT sensors to automatically reconfigure the simulation model, to make the digital twin continuously coherent and compliant with its actual counterpart.