Internet of things-aware process modeling: Integrating IoT devices as business process resources

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown in recent years to a huge branch of research: RFID, sensors and actuators as typical IoT devices are increasingly used as resources integrated into new value added applications of the Future Internet and are intelligently combined using standardised software services. While most of the current work on IoT integration focuses on areas of the actual technical implementation, little attention has been given to the integration of the IoT paradigm and its devices coming with native software components as resources in business processes of traditional enterprise resource planning systems. In this paper, we identify and integrate IoT resources as a novel automatic resource type on the business process layer beyond the classical human resource task-centric view of the business process model in order to face expanding resource planning challenges of future enterprise environments. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.