IETF IAB Workshop on Interconnecting Smart Objects with the Internet, March 2011 1 The Real-time Enterprise: IoT-enabled Business Processes Stephan Haller, Carsten Magerkurth SAP Research Center St. Gallen/Zürich SAP (Switzerland) Inc. stephan.haller@sap.com, carsten.magerkurth@sap.com Abstract. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a great potential in many different application areas for improving enterprise applications – from efficiency gains to completely new business processes and even business models. However, in order to realize this potential, significant hurdles still have to be overcome. This position paper focuses on one of these hurdles: The integration into business processes by means of process modelling and the orchestration of IoT services. Introduction The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot topic world-wide, both in research as well as in the media. As one aspect of a Future Internet, many application areas have been postulated – not only in industrial domains such as manufacturing, logistics, retail, service management, energy, public security, and insurance, but also for the life of every citizen – where IoT can bring significant improvements, leading even to new business models [1] [2]. In order to realize this vision many obstacles have to be overcome. Systems have to be opened up, secured, and made highly reliable to facilitate global collaboration across multiple organizations similar to the services offered on today’s Internet. Globally accepted standards, methods, and tools have to be developed to enable large scale infrastructures that can be configured, integrated, and monitored efficiently. Intelligent systems with substantial self-configuration, self-monitoring, and self-healing properties are required to manage the large and fast growing number of devices. Progress is being made in many of these areas; this position paper will thus focus on an issue that has not received enough attention yet, but is crucial for building and deploying IoT applications in industrial or enterprise settings on a wider scale: The modelling of IoT-aware business processes. Service-enablement of the IoT Enterprise systems nowadays are built on service-oriented architectures, and business processes in such systems are modelled as an orchestration of underlying services. In order to integrate the IoT into business process systems it is therefore necessary to service-enable IoT resources, e.g., the sensors and actuators that are used to interact with the physical environments. This can be done either through full-blown Web Services [3], or more likely, using REST-based approaches [4]. Using a service-based approach offers the additional advantage of hiding the heterogeneity of IoT device and data protocols from the business application. It is noteworthy that such IoT services have some different properties compared to common enterprise services. Not only might the technical implementation of the services be different, also thecommunication model and orchestration of services might be different, as the dynamic nature of the real world demands for flexible inter- service communication that must take unexpected events into account and, consequently, provide means of dealing with complex events patterns. Secondly, locality is of much more importance, both regarding the origin of the data delivered (e.g., the temperature in a specific room) as well as where the service is executed – not just anywhere in the cloud. Thirdly, we often have to deal with streaming data from which relevant information and events have to be extracted in (soft) real-time. And maybe most importantly, IoT services are inherently unreliable: the data delivered might be wrong, for example because of a decalibrated sensor, or they may suddenly become completely unavailable because the device hosting the service has run out of power or has been moved out of communication range. These different properties need to be taken into account when modelling processes that include IoT services.