Modeling and execution of event stream processing in business processes

The Internet of Things and Cyber-physical Systems provide enormous amounts of real-time data in the form of streams of events. Businesses can benefit from the integration of these real-world data; new services can be provided to customers, or existing business processes can be improved. Events are a well-known concept in business processes. However, there is no appropriate abstraction mechanism to encapsulate event stream processing in units that represent business functions in a coherent manner across the process modeling, process execution, and IT infrastructure layer. In this paper we present Event Stream Processing Units (SPUs) as such an abstraction mechanism. SPUs encapsulate application logic for event stream processing and enable a seamless transition between process models, executable process representations, and components at the IT layer. We derive requirements for SPUs and introduce EPC and BPMN extensions to model SPUs at the abstract and at the technical process layer. We introduce a transformation from SPUs in EPCs to SPUs in BPMN and implement our modeling notation extensions in Software AG ARIS. We present a runtime infrastructure that executes SPUs and supports implicit invocation and completion semantics. We illustrate our approach using a logistics process as running example.