An object-centric core metamodel for IoT-enhanced event logs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an object-centric core metamodel for IoT-enhanced event logs, aiming to unify diverse data models to improve data sharing and process mining in IoT-integrated business processes.

Contribution

It proposes a unified core model synthesizing key features of existing models, facilitating data sharing and collaboration in IoT-enabled process mining.

Findings

The core model effectively integrates IoT and process data.

The Python prototype demonstrates the model's applicability across use cases.

The model satisfies common requirements for IoT and process data integration.

Abstract

Advances in Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies have prompted the integration of IoT devices with business processes (BPs) in many organizations across various sectors, such as manufacturing, healthcare and smart spaces. The proliferation of IoT devices leads to the generation of large amounts of IoT data providing a window on the physical context of BPs, which facilitates the discovery of new insights about BPs using process mining (PM) techniques. However, to achieve these benefits, IoT data need to be combined with traditional process (event) data, which is challenging due to the very different characteristics of IoT and process data, for instance in terms of granularity levels. Recently, several data models were proposed to integrate IoT data with process data, each focusing on different aspects of data integration based on different assumptions and requirements. This fragmentation hampers data exchange and collaboration in the field of PM, e.g., making it tedious for researchers to share data. In this paper, we present a core model synthesizing the most important features of existing data models. As the core model is based on common requirements, it greatly facilitates data sharing and collaboration in the field. A prototypical Python implementation is used to evaluate the model against various use cases and demonstrate that it satisfies these common requirements.