Leveraging business process management through complex event processing for RFID and sensor networks

Current research efforts at RFID and sensor network technologies have made it possible to perceive real-time location information and physical properties like temperature and humidity in ubiquitous manufacturing and service systems. Complex event processing is the research field that deals with diverse and large amounts of multiple data and event streams for the purpose of identifying meaningful event patterns within the event cloud. CEP engines can be applied to detect real-time event patterns from RFID and sensor networks and trigger business rules. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of business process integration and management for ubiquitous manufacturing and service systems. Following the proposed architecture, we develop an integrated system, named edUFlow, which contains a core component of the event processing technique and RFID/USN systems for ubiquitous manufacturing and service process management. Huge amounts of RFID and sensor readings from the physical environment are abstracted as events in the CEP engine. High level events are then transmitted as inputs to traditional BPM systems, which process them according to business rules and trigger pre-defined actions in the rules. In this way, new, automated, and rich real-time sources in event cloud can be applied to event-driven process optimization of manufacturing and service systems.