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Extending BPMN 2.0 with Sensor Functions
Feng Gao, Sami Bhiri
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway,
IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. E-mail:{firstname.lastname}@deri.org.
Abstract
The integration of business processes with sensor networks
and smart devices will result in real-world aware
business processes. Therefore, it is necessary to describe
the physical information in the process modeling language
from a functional perspective to promote the process management.
More recently, Business Process Modelling Notation
(BPMN) 2.0 defines the formal semantics of its elements
and provides means for its extensibility. In this paper, we
propose BPMN 2.0 extensions according to the ARIS architecture
and Linked Data principles in order to achieve the
above goal.
1. Introduction
Recent research efforts in the sensor networks and smart
devices focused on making the sensors accessible in loose
coupled manners in service-oriented and resource-oriented
architectures [3, 5]. Both WS-* and RESTful services can be
augmented with semantic descriptions and benefit from the
Linked Data [1] to improve their interoperability. As sensors
and smart devices become less expensive, more powerful
and ubiquitous, it is not surprising to see enterprises looking
into sensors and smart devices based automation. However,
current approaches lack the abilities to model the device information
as a part of the business functions in a business
process model, and to express such information in an intuitive
way for the business people. Bearing this in minde, we
propose a business function model to import a sensor ontology
and its instance data, associate it with the BPMN 2.0
[2] process model and make improvements in the business
process management life-cycle.
2. Framework overview
As illustrated in Figure 1, we see the Business Process
Management lifecycle as four phases in general: Design,
Deployment, Execution and Analysis, in our approach the
extended BPMN document are usually produced/annotated
in the design phase. BPMN 2.0 elements provide a shallow
information and in order to enable business process discovery,
many BPMN 2.0 elements should be described in more
details with respect to all the views of the ARIS house [4].
With such extended annotations we establish the links between
the process model and the business functions, utilizing
the linked data mechanism it can be further linked to the
120
external open data, including the sensor ontology and its instance
data. Such model can improve the integration of the
logical process information with the real world infrastructure,
and the process analyzing environments will be able to
provide meaningful answers for the queries on the process
models and instances with specific interests based on the automated
observation and actions from the sensor networks.
Execution
Deploy
Analysis
Design
Retrieves
Generates
Extended
BPMN
Business
Function
Hierarchy Cloud
External
Cloud
SSN
ontology
Figure 1. The Overview of The Framework
3. Conclusion and future work
In this work we demonstrate our novel approach of embedding
the sensor metadata into the process modeling language
of BPMN 2.0 , we use the RDF based business function
model as a building block to establish a structured information
model for the business functions, within which the
concepts/data of the Semantic Sensor Network ontology can
be integrated, hence we can leverage the BPMN 2.0 extension
mechanism to insert links referencing from the tasks,
subprocesses and groups to their functional view according
to the ARIS house.
As a future work we plan to enable business process execution
based on this framework. Expanding the links to
other views in the ARIS house, i.e., control and data view,
may also be part of our future work.
References
[1] C. Bizer, T. Heath, and T. Berners-Lee. Linked data – the story
so far. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information
Systems, 5(3):1–22, 2009.
[2] OMG. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Version
2.0 Beta 2. Available at: http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0,
2010.
[3] C. Reed, M. Botts, J. Davidson, and G. Percivall. Ogc; sensor
web enablement:overview and high level achhitecture. In
Autotestcon, 2007 IEEE, pages 372 –380, 2007.
[4] A.-W. Scheer and K. Schneider. Aris architecture of integrated
information systems. pages 605–623, 1998.
[5] V. Stirbu. Towards a restful plug and play experience in the
web of things. In Semantic Computing, 2008 IEEE International
Conference on, pages 512 –517, 2008.