Monitoring and Control Framework for Business Processes in Ubiquitous Environments

Business processes in production, logistics need to be monitored in order to comply with official regulations, to schedule, plan the production or transport route, to ensure quality, find errors, but also to optimize the process itself. Often this monitoring needs to be done in real-time, e.g. to be able to see a potential error, take corrective actions in time. To monitor only traditional Key Performance Indicators might not be sufficient though as automatization in production, logistic environments advances, the number of sensors, actuators increase, make the systems more ubiquitous but also more complex, the focus of costumers moves from pricing, quality to environmental aspects. This paper presents an architecture of a process-oriented monitoring, control framework. It makes use of visual process models to cope with the complexity of these systems, combines them with sensors, actuators. This way, processes, process steps can be monitored in detail by enriching sensor data with process information to enable detailed analysis. In a former prototype, different properties such as energy consumption in production were monitored, values were fed into a prototype developed according to the framework. In the example presented in this paper we transfer the approach to food-traceability such that the architecture is explained, validated in the context of a realistic scenario from the logistics domain. This way, we foster the transferability of the framework under development.