The Internet of Things (IoT) enables a variety of smart applications, including smart home, smart manufacturing, and smart city. By enhancing Business Process Management Systems with IoT capabilities, the execution and monitoring of business processes can be significantly improved. Providing a holistic support for modeling, executing and monitoring IoT-driven processes, however, constitutes a challenge. Existing process modeling and process execution languages, such as BPMN 2.0, are unable to fully meet the IoT characteristics (e.g., asynchronicity and parallelism) of IoT-driven processes. In this article, we present BPMNE4IoT—A holistic framework for modeling, executing and monitoring IoT-driven processes. We introduce various artifacts and events based on the BPMN 2.0 metamodel that allow realizing the desired IoT awareness of business processes. The framework is evaluated along two real-world scenarios from two different domains. Moreover, we present a user study for comparing BPMNE4IoT and BPMN 2.0. In particular, this study has confirmed that the BPMNE4IoT framework facilitates the support of IoT-driven processes.

Integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) into business process management (BPM) aims to increase the automation level, efficiency, transparency, and comprehensibility of the business processes taking place in the physical world. The IoT enables the seamless networking of physical devices, allowing for the enrichment of processes with real-time data about the physical world and, thus, for optimized process automation and monitoring. To realize these benefits, the modeling of IoT-aware processes needs to be appropriately supported. Despite the great attention paid to this topic, more clarity is needed about the current state of the art of corresponding modeling solutions. Capturing IoT characteristics in business process models visually or based on labels is essential to ensure effective design and communication of IoT-aware business processes. A clear discernibility of IoT characteristics can enable the precise modeling and analysis of IoT-aware processes and facilitate collaboration among different stakeholders. With an increasing number of process model elements, it becomes crucial that process model readers can understand the IoT aspects of business processes in order to make informed decisions and to optimize the processes with respect to IoT integration. This paper presents the results of a large user study (N = 249) that explored the perception of IoT aspects in BPMN 2.0 process models to gain insights into the IoT’s involvement in business processes that drive the successful implementation and communication of IoT-aware processes.