Towards a Meta-modeling approach for an IoRT-aware Business Process

Abstract

In the context of Industry 4.0, the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) represents an attractive paradigm that aims to supply real-time data and automate tasks via human imitation. An IoRT is defined as the incorporation of IoT technology within robotic systems. In this setting, the business managers may improve performance and increase the productivity of their process by integrating the IoRT within their Business Processes (BPs). Nonetheless, this integration is not a trivial task due to the diversity of the IoT, robot, and BP concepts. In this paper, we address the incorporation of the IoRT within the BP through a lightweight extension of the Business Process Modeling Language 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) meta-model called IoRT-aware Business Process meta-model (IoRT-aware BP2M). Our proposed IoRT-aware BP2M allows, on the one hand, to represent the main concepts of IoT, robot and BP in a unique meta-model, and on the other hand to specify some practical constraints to select the suitable device. As a proof of concept, we generated an IoRT-aware BP model in the agriculture field with some implementation details. Besides, we used the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) ontology to prove the proposed meta-model’s completeness and clarity. The obtained results show that the proposed meta-model has an acceptable completeness value and ontological expressiveness.