Integration of Internet of Things in BPM Lifecycle: Concepts and Comparison of Approaches

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that appeared in 1998; it describes a world made up of intelligent devices organized in a network, which can be connected to each other but also to the external environment. The technology of IoT touches several fields of application among them the field of business process management (BPM) where intelligent devices are considered as additional resources delivering a huge amount of data (big data) and have effect on the execution of business process instances. The integration of connected objects in a business process improves business performance where IoT devices are managed in an efficient manner. The objective of this paper is to define the main concepts related to BPM and IoT and propose a meta-model highlighting the links between these concepts. Also, the paper synthesizes existing works addressing the integration of IoT technology in the life cycle of BPM and shows the impact of IoT on each phase of the BPM lifecycle. Finally, the paper evokes open questions of BPM in the context of IoT.