IoT-Driven Workflows for Risk Management and Control of Beehives

The internet of things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 technologies are becoming widely used in the field of apiculture to enhance honey production and reduce colony losses using connected scales combined with additional data, such as relative humidity and internal temperature. This paper exploits beehive weight measurements and builds appropriate business rules using two instruments. The first is an IoT fixed scale installed on one hive, taking rich continuous measurements, and used as a reference. The second is a portable nomad scale communicating with a smartphone and used for the remaining hives. A key contribution will be the run and triggering of a business process model based on apicultural business rules learned from experience and system observed events. Later, the evolution of the weight of each individual hive, obtained by either measurement or inference, will be associated with a graphical workflow diagram expressed with the business process model and notation (BPMN) language, and will trigger events that inform beekeepers to initiate relevant action. Finally, the BPMN processes will be transformed into executable models for model driven decision support. This contribution improves amateur and professional user-experience for honeybee keeping and opens the door for interoperability between the suggested model and other available simulations (weather, humidity, bee colony behavior, etc.)