Internet of Things – Architecture © - 76 -
processes are combined with the world of IoT, and especially here the
modelling of processes must take into account not only the idiosyncrasies of the
IoT domain, but also the specificities of the underlying business domain. The
different roles of the business objects and users will be defined here. Again, as
discussed in the Domain Model section, we do not prescribe a specific
taxonomy here. However, for pedagogical purposes we illustrate how this
taxonomy looks like in the context of the RM-ODP context Enterprise View (see
the discussion about RM-ODP [Raymond 1995] and roles in IoT Domain
Model Section 3.3.2.2):
Permission: what can be done? For instance a self-regulating ventilation
system can be started by a central control system;
Prohibition: what must not be done? For instance the ventilation system
may not be shut down in its entirety if the outside temperature is above a
pre-defined value and if humans are present in the building;
Obligations: the central control system needs to save recorded
environmental parameters for each room in the entire building
(temperature, humidity, ventilation settings). Such records can, for
instance, be required by national occupational-health laws.
When it comes to the practical realisation of the process management, these
different policies will come into play when the respective business processes
are modelled. In the process Section 5.2, we pick up the notion of enterprise
views and illustrate how they factor into the requirements process.
The IoT Process Management FG is conceptually closely related to the Service
Organisation FG and acts as a proxy to applications that integrate an IoT-A-
compliant IoT system. Naturally, the IoT Process Management FG has a
dependency on the Service Organisation FG, as a central concept in the
execution of (business) processes is the finding, binding, and invoking of
Services that are used for each process step. The IoT Process Management
FG therefore relies on Service Organisation to map the abstract process
definitions to more concrete Service invocations.
Applications can utilise the tools and interfaces defined for the IoT Process
Management FG in order to stay on the (abstract) conceptual level of a
(business) process, while, at the same time, making use of IoT-related
functionality without the necessity of dealing with the complexities of IoT
Services. In this respect, the IoT Process Management FG provides conceptual
interfaces to the IoT ARM, that are alternatives to the more concrete Virtual
Entity FG and Service Organisation FG interfaces.