Reliability of IoT-Aware BPMN Healthcare Processes

Abstract

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) has become the de-facto business process modelling language standard. Healthcare processes have been increasingly incorporating participants other than humans, including Internet of Things (IoT) physical devices such as biomedical sensors or patient electronic tags. Due to its critical requirements, IoT-aware healthcare processes justify the relevance of Quality of Services aspects, such as reliability, availability, and cost, among others. This chapter focuses on reliability and proposes to use the Stochastic Workflow Reduction (SWR) method to calculate the reliability of IoT-aware BPMN healthcare processes. In addition, the chapter proposes a BPMN language extension to provide processes with reliability information. This way, at design time, modellers can analyse alternatives and, at run time, reliability information can be used to select participants, execute services, or monitor process executions. The proposal is applied to an Ambient Assisted Living system use case, a rich example of an IoT-aware healthcare process.