Presentation at the International Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems;

Yusuf Kirikkayis, Porto, Portugal, 8 November 2023, 12:00 AM

Enhancing business processes with IoT capabilities enables the collection of data, which can be leveraged to optimize and automate business processes. As a prerequisite for exploiting these benefits in the context of BPM, IoT aspects needs to be explicitly captured in business models. Modeling IoT-driven business processes with BPMN 2.0, however, might be hindered by the ambiguous use of the modeling elements. To tackle this challenge, we have proposed a BPMN 2.0 extension for IoT (BPMNE4IoT) that incorporates specific IoT modeling elements. BPMNE4IoT enables the modeling, execution, monitoring, and recording of IoT-driven business processes. In general, the effectiveness of any BPMN 2.0 extensions depend on its comprehensibility by BPM practitioners. Consequently, user studies are required, which investigate the effects of IoT-specific elements on process model readers. This paper presents the results of such a user study (N=249), which aims to determine whether IoT involvement becomes visually better apparent in our language extension BPMNE4IoT compared to standard BPMN 2.0. In particular, the user study confirms that the involvement of IoT aspects in BPMNE4IoT is more discernible for both experts and non-experts compared to the BPMN 2.0 standard.