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2.12 Recommendations on Research Topics 119
2.12.5 Processes
The ability to model IoT-aware business processes, with all the peculiarities
of such processes, and the availability of related process execution engines
will be a key for further adoption of IoT technologies in the enterprise and
business world. Research targeting the convergence of IoT with BPM and the
necessary tooling needs to be strengthened. In particular it is recommended
to address the following topics:
Modelling of IoT-aware processes
Existing (business) process modelling languages need to be extended and
standardized in a way to support the highly event-driven nature of IoT processes,
to explicitly integrate the notion of physical entities and devices, to
add parameters for quality of information, trust, and reliability, and to enable
the (sometimes ad hoc) distribution of sub-processes.
Inherent unreliability of IoT-aware processes
As the data coming from IoT devices such as sensors cannot always be guaranteed
to be accurate and the devices and related services can suddenly fail, it is
important that data quality and quality of service parameters can be modelled
in order to build “reliable-enough” systems.
Execution of IoT-aware processes
Modelled processes as described above need to be executed both on centralized
process execution engines, but often also on small, constrained devices. This
holds true particularly for sub-processes responsible for the behaviour of a
set of IoT devices. To support such operations, very lightweight and efficient
process execution engines are needed.
Large-scale distribution of process logic
IoT processes are widely distributed in nature; certain parts of the business
logic are often executed on local devices. This ranges from simple filtering and
aggregation to the execution of business rules or even completely autonomous
behaviour of individual devices. The methods and frameworks need to be
developed to manage such distributions of software, to decide what (sub-)