A Software Framework for Supporting Ubiquitous Business Processes: An ANSI/ISA-95 Approach

Nowadays, organizations to survive competitively they need to be, innovative and efficient. The way the Internet has been expanding along with other technological changes is leading us to a future in which all the objects that surround us will be seamlessly integrated into information networks. The possibility to implement concepts related with the ubiquitous computing in the business process-level will influence how they are designed, structured, monitored, and managed. One of the most remarkable possibilities of ubiquitous computing can be the real-time monitoring of a particular business process: it should be possible to analyze the flow of materials and information, identify possible points of failure or improve energetic efficiency with a small delay on they occur in reality. Currently, there is no direct and automated link between ubiquitous business processes descriptions and their physical executions which, frequently, promotes the occurrence of a discrepancy between the planned modes of operation and the executed ones. The ubiquitous business processes will enable a narrowing between the real (objects) and virtual (models) world and the possibility to create adaptive business processes that can predict failures, adapting themselves to changes in the environment is an attractive challenge. In this PhD thesis, we will propose a new software framework to monitor real-time executions of ubiquitous industrial business processes.