Extending BPMN for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSNs) are hard to program, in particular so for business domain experts that have a good understanding of how WSNs can best be used to improve business operations. This contributes to hampering WSN adoption by enterprises. As business process modeling languages such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) are well accessible to domain experts, they can be used as a tool to facilitate WSN programming. In this paper, we explore the properties of WSNs that set them apart from traditional IT systems and use these properties to derive requirements for BPMN extensions that are tailored to the specifics of WSNs. We furthermore propose a set of BPMN extensions that fulfill these requirements and demonstrate that they are better suited for modeling WSN processes than standard BPMN.