Integrating IoT-Driven Events into Business Processes

Extending Business Process Management (BPM) with Internet of Things (IoT) enhances process automation, improves process monitoring, and enables decision making based on data from the physical world. In this context, the transformation of low-level IoT data to process-level IoT-driven events constitutes an important step. However, the modeling of these transformations is challenging due to the complexity of IoT environments. Contemporary approaches do not provide sufficient support to model these transformations. Process models either become too complex with increasing numbers of devices and transformations, or this logic is externalized and viewed as a black box. This paper presents an integrated approach to model IoT-driven events in processes based on a BPMN 2.0 extension and a tool that adopts concepts from DMN. A scenario from smart production is used to demonstrate the application and improved integration of IoT-driven events in processes.