Context-Aware BPM Using IoT-Integrated Context Ontologies and IoT-Enhanced Decision Models

IoT (Internet of Things) has the capability of capturing dynamic context from the physical world into the digital world. Context-aware BPM (Business Process Management) should integrate IoT as a key perspective of dynamic context of a business process and to enhance the decision making in a business process. IoT is often used to automate the process execution or integrated in the process model as resources of smart devices and additional concepts. In this way, IoT data is directly used without processing or reasoning with other contextual data to obtain higher-order contextual knowledge, which impairs its potential capability. The context layer and the decision layer are still missing while integrating IoT in BPM to obtain context-awareness. Decisions are still considered within context-aware BPM in a traditional way. This paper provides a separate concern of decisions from the process flow. We propose that the context-aware BPM ecosystem consists of four components which are: context-aware process models, context models, decision models and context-aware process execution. A framework is proposed to connect the IoT infrastructure to the context-aware BPM ecosystem using IoT-integrated ontologies and IoT-enhanced decision models, which enables the capabilities of IoT to make business processes and the decision making involved aware of the dynamic context.