Service-based Abstraction and Programming Mechanisms for Bridging Business Processes and IoT Big Data

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Volker Gruhn; Professor Dr. Manfred Reichert
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 449721677

Internet of Things (IoT), the inter-connectivity of objects, sensors, and everyday items, promises a new era where people, real objects and virtual objects are naturally integrated and can interact with each other in a convenient and efficient way. In recent years, IoT has gained huge momentum and is becoming the new infrastructure in various application domains. Business Process Modelling (BPM) has established itself as a powerful technology in the integration, operation, and design of cooperative processes. With the boom-ing of IoT, there is an increasing need to synergize IoT and BPM: BPM may sense the physical world faster and more accurately by means of IoT, and the fast-expanding IoT big data may be more effectively leveraged and ‘programmed’ by means of BPM. BPM has been widely used in retailing, logistics, manufacturing and many other service indus-tries for decades. IoT and BPM are different areas with separately developed concepts and formalisms, but could greatly benefit from each other through a convergence of formalisms and methods, and in fact have to be merged to enable future applications. BPM can provide business logic and program-ming paradigms for better utilizing IoT data. In turn, IoT can equip BPM with the ability to sense the status of the physical objects and environments faster and more accurately. How to integrate IoT data and services into BPM to make the latter IoT-aware, however, is challenging. The IoT environment is poorly structured and highly dynamic. Unstructuredness is the principal characteristic of the IoT as most of the communication between loosely-coupled objects is accomplished ad-hoc and situative. Traditional BPM approaches with monolithic process models have trouble dealing with such situation: both orchestration and cho-reography, which are the two main mechanisms of BPM for organizing and coordinating busi-ness flows, require knowledge about the structure and interactions of participating processes. Dynamism is a matter of routine for IoT. There might be tens of thousands of objects in an IoT environment and many objects are transient: some objects may turn on and off periodically, new objects may join at any time, some objects are mobile and move from one community to the other, and some objects just disappear due to system errors or running out of battery. In this project, we aim to develop the necessary programming mechanisms and layers of abstraction to bridge the gap between business process modelling and IoT applications. At the core of our approach, we split business process models into several micro processes that represent the dynamic IoT components. We furthermore will develop transformation algorithms to convert IoT business process models into executable entities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: China
• Partner Organisation: National Natural Science Foundation of China
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Yanbo Han; Professor Dr. Liang Zhang