Monitoring and control framework for business processes in ubiquitous environments

Business processes in production and logistics need to be monitored in order to comply with official regulations, to schedule and plan the production or transport route, to ensure quality and 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 and take corrective actions in time. To monitor only traditional Key Performance Indicators might not be sufficient though as automatization in production and logistic environments advances, the number of sensors and actuators increase and make the systems more ubiquitous but also more complex and the focus of costumers moves from pricing and quality to environmental aspects. This paper presents an architecture of a process-oriented monitoring and control framework. It makes use of visual process models to cope with the complexity of these systems and combines them with sensors and actuators. This way, processes and 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 and 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 and validated in the context of a realistic scenario from the logistics domain. This way, we foster the transferability of the framework under development.