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Storytelling Integration of the Internet of Things into Business Processes

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Business Process Management Forum (BPM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 329))

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Abstract

This paper discusses the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) into Business Processes (BPs). To define the business logic of thing-aware BPs, existing approaches extend traditional workflow languages (i.e., who does what, why, when, and where) with constructs like things’ roles. However, this way of defining the business logic restricts things’ operations and, thus, hinders them from initiating ad-hoc/opportunistic collaboration with peers. To overcome this limitation, we tap into the storytelling principles to introduce the concept of Process of Things (PoT) as a new way of integrating IoT into BPs. A PoT is specified as a story whose script indicates the characters that things will play as well as the scenes that will feature these things. A PoT, also, allows things to collaborate by offering value-added services to end-users. For demonstration purposes, a hospital scenario is implemented using a combination of real and simulated sensors along with different IoT technologies and communication protocols.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    PoT is different from thing-aware BPs as discussed in [11, 24]. It is about thing versus task as a process’s constituent.

  2. 2.

    Readers are referred to [23] for more details on goal decomposition.

  3. 3.

    (x, y) refers to min and max occurrence.

  4. 4.

    Detection refers to thing availability in a scene from which certain things are selected for inclusion in a script completion based on roles/capacities’ requirements. Not all detected things would be relevant for a scene.

  5. 5.

    Improvisation might raise concerns with the availability of some necessary things as prescribed in a scene (Listing 2-line 7).

  6. 6.

    w3c.github.io/wot/current-practices/wot-practices.html.

  7. 7.

    Connecting things allows to address the lack of/missing characters from a scene (Listing 2, Line 4).

  8. 8.

    Detection does not fall into the scope of this work.

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Correspondence to Zakaria Maamar .

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Maamar, Z., Sellami, M., Faci, N., Ugljanin, E., Sheng, Q.Z. (2018). Storytelling Integration of the Internet of Things into Business Processes. In: Weske, M., Montali, M., Weber, I., vom Brocke, J. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 329. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_8

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