Co-location specification for IoT-aware collaborative business processes

Technologies from the Internet of Things (IoT) create new possibilities to directly connect physical processes in the ‘real’ world to digital business processes in the administrative world. Objects manipulated in the real world (the ‘things’ of IoT) can directly provide data to digital processes, and these processes can directly influence the behavior of the objects. An increasing body of work exists on specifying and executing the interface between the physical and the digital worlds for individual objects. But many real-life business scenarios require that the handling of multiple physical objects is synchronized by digital processes. An example is the cross-docking of sea containers at ports: here we have containers, ships, cranes and trucks that are all ‘things’ in the IoT sense. Cross-docking processes only work when these ‘things’ are properly co-located in time and space. Therefore, we propose an approach to specify this co-location in multi-actor, IoT-aware business process models, based on the concept of spheres. We discuss consistency checking between co-location spheres and illustrate our approach with container cross-docking processes.