Supporting Technology Independent Interoperability between Business Processes and IoT Devices

  • Pedro Valderas Universitat Politècnica de València

Resumo


The Internet of Things allows digital business processes to use physical devices to automate and improve the execution of some of their tasks. A business process is executed by a process engine, which usually provides built-in mechanisms to interact with IoT devices through REST APIs. However, IoT devices are technologically heterogeneous by nature. If they are not based on REST, the native support provided by process engines is not enough to interact with them. In addition, in case IoT devices have REST APIs, built-in mechanisms of process engines provide technologically coupled solutions since the engine must be configured with the connection data of each specific device. Thus, time-consuming adaptation tasks are required to update the process engine if IoT devices need to be replaced due to changes in business requirements. In this work, we provide a solution to improve these problems based on ontologies, BPMN, and microservices. First, IoT devices are abstractly described by means of the notions proposed by the SAREF ontology. Then, executable BPMN models that use the ontological descriptions of IoT devices are defined to implement a business process. Finally, microservices are used as instantiations of the IoT devices defined with the SAREF ontology, playing the role of gateways between the process engine and the real IoT devices, providing a high level of technological independence between both.

Referências

BPMN. (2010). Business Process Model and Notation Concepts. [link]

Cao, H., Yang, X., & Deng, R. (2021). Ontology-Based Holonic Event-Driven Architecture for Autonomous Networked Manufacturing Systems. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 18(1), 205–215.

Daniele, L., García-Castro, R., Lefrançois, M., & Poveda-Villalon, M. S. (2017). The Smart Applications REFerence Ontology.

Deehan, N., Lea, N., Richtsmeier, I., Wulf, J., Graham, A., Ruecker, B., Oliver, R., & Ausley, C. (2022). Make REST calls from Camunda Platform 7 Example. [link]

Dupire, B., & Fernandez, E. B. (2001). The Command Dispatcher Pattern. In 8th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs. [link]

Eugster, P. T., Felber, P. A., Guerraoui, R., and Kermarrec, A.-M. (2003). The many faces of publish/subscribe. ACM computing surveys (CSUR), 35(2):114–131.

Gómez, H. D., Garcia-Rodriguez, J., Azorin-Lopez, J., Tomás, D., Fuster-Guillo, A., & Mora-Mora, H. (2021). IA-CPS: Intelligent architecture for cyber-physical systems management. Journal of Computational Science, 53, 101409.

Kim, S. D., Lee, J. Y., Kim, D. Y., Park, C. W., & La, H. J. (2014). Modeling BPEL-based collaborations with heterogeneous IoT devices. Proceedings - 2014 World Ubiquitous Science Congress: 2014 IEEE 12th International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, DASC 2014, 289–294.

Mandal, S., Hewelt, M., & Weske, M. (2017). A framework for integrating real-world events and business processes in an IoT environment. Lecture Notes in Computer, 10573 LNCS, 194–212. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-69462-7_13

Mottola, L., Picco, G. P., Oppermann, F. J.,…., Tranquillini, S., & Voigt, T. (2019). MakeSense: Simplifying the Integration of Wireless Sensor Networks into Business Processes. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 45(6), 576–596.

Sasirekha, S., & Swamynathan, S. (2016). Collaboration of IoT devices using semantically enabled resource oriented middleware. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 21-24-Sept, 98–105.

Schönig, S., Ackermann, L., Jablonski, S., & Ermer, A. (2018). An integrated architecture for IoT-aware business process execution. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 318, 19–34.

Slimani, T. (2015). Ontology Development: A Comparing Study on Tools, Languages and Formalisms. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 8(24).

Suri, K., Gaaloul, W., Cuccuru, A., & Gerard, S. (2017). Semantic framework for internet of things-aware business process development. Proceedings - 2017 IEEE 26th International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, WETICE 2017, 214–219.

Torres, V., Serral, E., Valderas, P., Pelechano, V., & Grefen, P. (2020). Modeling of IoT devices in Business Processes: A Systematic Mapping Study. Proceedings - 2020 IEEE 22nd Conference on Business Informatics, CBI 2020, 1, 221–230.

Valderas, P., & Torres, V. (2023). Towards a Semantic Interoperability in IoTEnhanced Business Processes. An Event-Driven Solution based on Microservices. 2023 19th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, IE 2023 - Proceedings.

Valderas, P., Torres, V., & Serral, E. (2022). Modelling and executing IoT-enhanced business processes through BPMN and microservices. J. of Systems and Software, 184.

Valderas, P., Torres, V., & Serral, E. (2023). Towards an Interdisciplinary Development of IoT-Enhanced Business Processes. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1–24.

Völter, M. (2006). Software architecture: A pattern language for building sustainable software architectures. In EuroPLoP 2006 - 11th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (pp. 31–66). Mar.

Weske, M. (2012). Business process management: Concepts, languages, architectures, second edition. Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures, Second Edition, 1–403.

Zambroski, S., & Pohl, T. (2016). MQTT Camunda BPMN.
Publicado
06/05/2024
VALDERAS, Pedro. Supporting Technology Independent Interoperability between Business Processes and IoT Devices. In: CONGRESSO IBERO-AMERICANO EM ENGENHARIA DE SOFTWARE (CIBSE), 27. , 2024, Curitiba/PR. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2024 . p. 31-45.