Toward uBPMN-Based Patterns for Modeling Ubiquitous Business Processes

Abstract

Ubiquitous business processes are the new generation of processes that pervade the physical space and interact with their environments using a minimum of human involvement. Although they are now widely deployed in the industry, their deployment is still <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</i> . They are implemented after an arbitrary modeling phase or no modeling phase at all. The absence of a solid modeling phase backing up the implementation generates many loopholes that are stressed in the literature. Here, we tackle the issue of modeling ubiquitous business processes. We propose patterns to represent the recent ubiquitous computing features. These patterns are the outcome of an analysis we conducted in the field of human-computer interaction to examine how the features are actually deployed. The patterns' understandability, ease-of-use, usefulness, and completeness are examined via a user experiment. The results indicate that these four indexes are on the positive track. Hence, the patterns may be the backbone of ubiquitous business process modeling in industrial applications.