Publication | Open Access
The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges
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2017
Year
Web Of ThingEngineeringBusiness IntelligenceSmart CityCollaborative Business ProcessesIot SystemIot InteroperabilityIot ChallengeBpm ConceptsMutual BenefitsInternet Of ThingsIndustrial InformaticsIot Data ManagementBusiness Process ManagementEdge ComputingCloud ComputingBpm FieldMachine-to-machine CommunicationTechnology
The Internet of Things connects autonomous devices into complex systems, while Business Process Management analyzes and optimizes collaborative processes, and the two fields, though traditionally separate, can mutually benefit each other. The paper investigates how IoT and BPM can be combined and discusses the emerging challenges.
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges.