Semantic Framework for Internet of Things-Aware Business Process Development

The proliferation of connected devices, wherein Sensors, Actuators and Tags (such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID)) are able to seamlessly communicate to their environment and to each other for sharing information or to perform some actions has created the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. These devices expose their functionality via standard services and application programming interfaces (APIs). They are considered to be one of the key technology enablers to foster the vision of a smart world, comprising of smart objects, smart supply chain management, smart manufacturing (Industry 4.0), smart buildings, to name a few. In fact, today these IoT devices continuously take part in various business processes that are being executing within the boundaries of the same enterprise or in different enterprises. Thus, there is an evident need to model these processes that are associated with IoT resources in a formal and unambiguous manner. However, in context of business processes, these is a lack of formalized and explicit description for IoT resources, thus hampering their efficient modeling and management. To bridge this gap, we propose a semantic framework for developing IoT-aware business processes as follows, (i) formalizing IoT resource description w.r.t Internet of Things Architecture (IoT-A) reference model in context of business processes, (ii) formalizing IoT properties and allocation rules for optimal resource management and (iii) resolving resource conflicts based on strategies. To illustrate the feasibility of our framework, we evaluated our semantic model for coverage of concepts in IoT-A reference model along with development of a proof of concept tool for integrating the IoT resources and our semantic model during the process modeling phase.