Possibilities of Integrating Internet of Things Technologies into Business Process Management to Enable Automated Process Management, Measurement and Optimization

With the rise of the importance of the Internet of Things, new technologies are developed to provide healthy and stable machine to machine communication. This master thesis elaborates on an architecture to integrate Internet of Things technologies into the business domain to enable automatic business process management. To enable the integration of IoT technologies into business process management, the analysis and transformation of the existing business infrastructure is required. Restructuring the existing application landscape to simplify communication between business solutions is necessary to ensure stable communication between the business domain and devices. Hence, the introduction of an ESB to manage the communication not only reduces maintenance efforts for existing applications, but also realizes message transfers. Extending the transformed business architecture with IoT devices is accomplished by introducing the concept of edge routers. They serve as a gateway between business applications and devices, thus ensure the transmission of messages. However, to fully leverage the integration, additional services, that provide enhanced information and functionality to the business are required. These services take care of the authentication and authorization of devices, the persistent storage of information and a unified interface for discovering devices and their capabilities. Finally, a prototypical implementation of a business process is conducted. The prototype illustrates the message exchange between the business domain and IoT devices. Therefore, it utilizes the MQTT protocol as an edge router as well as custom MQTT clients. Together with the augmentation of the business process to utilize the device messages, the automatic business process monitoring and optimization is enabled through automatic KPI measurement.