Exploring Context Sensing in the Goal-Driven Design of Business Processes

As more and more business processes execute in increasingly rich digital environments, there is great opportunity for these processes to make use of the context data to better achieve business goals. Selecting what context data to employ and how to incorporate context sensing into a business process design is therefore of great interest. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows organizations to proactively identify and explore the space of context information that can be sensed and utilized in a business process, with the aim of selecting such context information that can deliver important business benefits. Then, given the selected context information, the approach derives BP design constraints that determine at which points in a business process the selected context information can be sensed and used. The approach builds upon earlier work on goal-driven design of context-aware business processes. Examples from the passenger transportation domain are used for illustration.