Automatic Decomposition of IoT Aware Business Processes with Data and Control Flow Distribution

The Internet of Things (IoT) is generally seen as a distributed information gathering platform when used in business processes (BP). IoT devices have computational capabilities that can and should be used to execute fragments of BP that present benefits for both the devices and the BP execution engine. In fact, executing parts of the BP in the IoT devices may result in the reduction of the number of messages exchanged between the IoT network and the BP execution engine, increasing the battery lifespan of the IoT devices; also, it reduces the workload of the BP execution engine. However, processes are still defined following a centralised approach, making it difficult to use the full capabilities of these devices. In this paper, we present an automatic decomposition solution for IoT aware business processes, described using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). We start from a BP model that follows a centralised approach and apply our decomposition method to transfer to the IoT devices the operations that can be performed there. This transformation preserves the control and the data flows of the original process and reduces the central processing and the number of messages exchanged in the network. The code that IoT devices execute is automatically generated from the BPMN process being decentralised.