Making Business Environments Smarter: A Context-Adaptive Petri Net Approach

Business Environments, such as shops, offices, automation plants, etc., are usually handled by the modeling and execution of business processes using languages such as Colored Petri Nets (CPN). CPN are a mathematical and graphical modeling language with powerful analysis techniques. However, current Petri nets formalisms are not aware of their execution context (i.e., Users and equipment location, temporal and environmental properties, etc.) and therefore it is not possible to manage business processes whose execution adapts to its context. To support this adaptation and make business processes smarter, this paper extends CPN with ontologies. Ontologies are powerful and very expressive techniques for modeling context and storing its data at execution time. To be aware of the current context, a context manager is used to sense the execution context using ubicomp technologies and represent it in the ontologies. This solution not only allows the modeling and execution of context-adaptive Petri nets, but also improves system design, reuse, and maintenance by dealing with context and business behavior as separate concerns.