Business Process Models for Analysis of Industrial IoT Applications

International audienceIndustrial automation is a complex process involving various stakeholders. The two important aspects to consider during the automation system development are its business production goals and its technical implementation. The international standard IEC 61499 helps to specify distributed automation using a generic architectural model, targeting the technical development of the automation. However, it is not easy to analyse whether these IEC 61499 models satisfy production goals due to their informal semantics and inherent complexities of distributed logic. In this paper, we propose to use Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) to express the underlying IEC 61499 specification. We propose a transformation from an IEC 61499 specification to the BPMN model. This model presents the automation from a business point-of-view, and it also enables quantitative analysis of process models. Specifically, it allows business analysts to perform analysis related to cost, resource allocation, and time in automation. This analysis is achieved by transforming the business processes to formal model in Maude rewriting logic. The viability of our proposals is illustrated using an industrial case study of a packaging system