Supporting the Implementation of Digital Twins for IoT-Enhanced BPs.

IoT-Enhanced Business Processes make use of Internet of Things technology to integrate physical devices into the process as digital actors. Closely related to this topic arises the concept of Digital Twin, which is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes that connect to the physical counterpart to represent, simulate, or predict changes in the physical system. There are many works that focus on supporting the high-fidelity implementation of Digital Twins for specific physical devices. However, few of them consider the process as a real-world entity to be integrated into the Digital Twin. In this work, we present a microservice architecture to support the implementation of Digital Twins for IoT-Enhanced Business Processes, considering not only the physical devices but also the process itself and the relationship among them. This architectural solution is supported by a model-driven development approach, which proposes (1) the construction of a BPMN model to represent an IoT-enhanced Business Process and (2) the application of model transformation to automatically generate both Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) models and microservice Java code templates. DTDL models are used in the implementation of the Digital Twins for the IoT-Enhanced Business Process. Java code templates are used to facilitate the implementation of the microservices required to deploy the IoT-enhanced Business Process and its Digital Twins into the proposed architecture and maintain the digital and physical parts synchronised.