Decentralising internet of things aware BPMN business processes

Abstract

The increase in computation and communication capabilities of sensor devices made possible their use as active participants in business processes. In this setting, sensors can execute parts of these processes in a decentralised way. However, business processes are still defined following a centralised approach, making it difficult to integrate the capabilities of these devices. In this paper we provide an automatic procedure to decentralise Internet of Things aware business processes defined using the Business Process Modelling Notation (version 2.0). We depart from a centralised description of a business process and transform it by generating pools with the business logic that sensors are going to execute, while keeping the original process semantics. We generate the code to run on the sensor network and then we deploy it together with the business process and the middleware configuration that enables the communication (via web services) between the sensor network and the business process engine.