How Physical Objects and Business Workflows Can Be Correlated

Service Oriented Architectures ease integration of heterogeneous systems, such as sensor data and workflow systems. Systems are integrated since they model an overlapping part of the physical world, i.e., physical objects exchanged between different parties. For workflows handling physical objects, the correlation of sensor data with workflow states and workflow state changes are investigated in this paper. Further, the implications of the state or state change correlation on the workflow execution and the support by existing service infrastructures is discussed.