Emergent Behavior and Uncertainty in IoT-Enhanced Business Processes: Challenges and Future Directions
Emerging TechnologiesSoftware Engineering
Summary
The authors explain that business processes using Internet of Things (IoT) devices are very complex because many different systems and people interact in unpredictable ways. This complexity causes uncertainty and makes it hard to control or predict what will happen during the process, especially since parts of it only become clear while it is happening. They look at these challenges from three points: how to represent uncertainty, how to run these IoT-enhanced processes, and how to manage unexpected behaviors as they arise. The authors also identify research gaps and suggest directions for future work to better understand and handle these evolving processes.
Authors
Marco Pegoraro, Sara Pettinari, Ivan Compagnucci, Marco Franceschetti, Ronny Seiger
Abstract
IoT-enhanced business processes are characterized by high complexity due to heterogeneous actors, varying levels of autonomy among participating systems, continuously evolving execution contexts spanning the digital and physical worlds, and continuous event streams. In such settings, process behavior partially emerges only at runtime through complex interactions involving humans, IoT devices, physical objects, software systems, agents, and services. This complexity introduces partial observability, uncertainty, and runtime dynamics that are difficult to anticipate and that challenge traditional business process management (BPM) assumptions and systems. We discuss these challenges from three perspectives, addressing 1) uncertainty representation, 2) operationalization of IoT-enhanced processes, and 3) runtime management of emergent behavior. Based on a motivating scenario and an analysis of the state of the art, we identify open research gaps and outline short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations to shape a research agenda on emergent behavior in IoT-enhanced business processes.