From Smart Objects to Smarter Workflows -- An Architectural Approach

To live up to its promised business impact, the emerging Internet of Things must be accompanied by new ways to decentralize and adapt business logic for smart objects. Smart object lifecycle management refers to the decentralized, event-based, context-sensitive execution and adaptation of processes by smart physical objects during their path through different domains and their interaction with other entities. These entities include the end-user or consumer, other objects, or web-based information services. In this paper, we propose an approach how events and reaction to those events can be virtually attached to certain situations in the lifecycle of physical smart objects. In addition, we present an smart object lifecycle architecture for enabling multiple stakeholders to provide the necessary event and processing information for specific domains.