Towards Real World Aware Enterprise Systems - Reflecting the Quality Information of Physical Resources in Services and Processes

In order to facilitate the development of IoT-aware business processes that adapt to real-world context information, we present a novel modeling approach that reflects IoT quality information inherent in physical resources and maps them to the higher layers of enterprise information systems. Quality information is crucial to real-world applications, and is therefore part of standard real-world resource descriptions. Correspondingly, on a service level, quality aspects are referred to as Quality of Service (QoS) and are usually expressed by using Service Level Agreements that are unrelated to the quality information on a resource level. On a process level, quality aspects are currently much less considered, as IoT-aware business processes are still to emerge at a large scale. In order to bridge the gap between physical resources and business process management, we propose to map Quality of Information (QoI) and Quality of Actuation (QoA) common to the resource layer as important, non-functional Internet of Things (IoT) related aspects to the service and process layers in enterprise information systems. By following a bottom up approach, we investigate how standard modeling notations such as USDL and BPMN 2.0 can be integrated and augmented for handling the real world aspects QoI and QoA within IoT-aware business processes. Finally, we exemplify the proposed enhancements by a business process including IoT resources and services.