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The business operations of today's enterprises are heavily influenced by numerous of internal and external business events. With the Event Driven Architecture and particularly the Complex Event Processing (CEP), the technology required for identifying complex correlations in these large amounts of event data right after its appearance has already emerged. The resulting gain in operational transparency builds the foundation for (near) real-time reactions. This motivated extensive research activities especially in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), which essentially coined the term Event-Driven BPM (EDBPM). Now, several years after the advent of this new concept, the purpose of this paper is to shed light to the question: where are we now on our way towards a sophisticated adoption of the CEP technology within BPM?

The research methodology of this paper is a structured literature analysis. It basically follows the procedure proposed by vom Brocke et al. (2009). This verified five-step process – entitled “Reconstructing the giant” – allowed a rigorous study. As a result, various research clusters were derived, whose state-of-the-art exposed existing research gaps within EDBPM.

First of all, the paper provides a concise conceptual basis on different application possibilities of EDBPM. Afterwards, it synthesizes current research into six clusters and highlights most significant work within them. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to tackle existing research gaps to pave the way towards fully realizing the potentials of the paradigm.

So far, a comparable study of the current state-of-the-art within EDBPM is non-existent. The findings of this paper, e.g. the proposed research agenda, help scholars to focus their research efforts on specific aspects that need to be considered in order to advance the adoption of the CEP technology within BPM.

The purpose of this paper is to show how to employ complex event processing (CEP) for the observation and management of business processes. It proposes a conceptual architecture of BPM event producer, processor, and consumer and describes technical implications for the application with standard software in a perfect order scenario.

The authors discuss business process analytics as the technological background. The capabilities of CEP in a BPM context are outlined an architecture design is proposed. A sophisticated proof‐of‐concept demonstrates its applicability.

The results overcome the separation and data latency issues of process controlling, monitoring, and simulation. Distinct analyses of past, present, and future blur into a holistic real‐time approach. The authors highlight the necessity for configurable event producer in BPM engines, process event support in CEP engines, a common process event format, connectors to visualizers, notifiers and return channels to the BPM engine.

Further research will thoroughly evaluate the approach in a variety of business settings. New concepts and standards for the architecture's building blocks will be needed to improve maintainability and operability.

Managers learn how CEP can yield insights into business processes' operations. The paper illustrates a path to overcome inflexibility, latency, and missing feedback mechanisms of current process modeling and control solutions. Software vendors might be interested in the conceptualization and the described needs for further development.

So far, there is no commercial CEP‐based BPM solution which facilitates a round trip from insight to action as outlines. As major software vendors have begun developing solutions (BPM/BPA solutions), this paper will stimulate a debate between research and practice on suitable design and technology.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

The paper aims to study realization requirements for the flexible enactment of artifact-centric business processes in a dynamic, collaborative environment and to develop a workflow execution framework that can effectively address those requirements.

This study proposed a framework and contract-based, event-driven architecture design and implementation that can directly realize collaborative artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture (SOA) without any model conversion.

The results show that the approach is feasible in presenting several key benefits over the use of existing workflow systems to run artifact-centric processes.

Most of the existing approaches require an artifact-centric model to be transformed into executable workflow languages to run on existing workflow management systems. This study argues that the model conversion can incur losses of information and affect traceability and monitoring ability of workflows, especially in an SOA where a workflow can span across multiple inter-business entities.

Explains that the first robotics commercialization project of the National Robotics Engineering Consortium (USA) is Demeter, the first unmanned, fully automated windrower. Describes how lunar rover and terrestrial military vehicle technology is combined to define two core technologies for mobile agricultural equipment ‐ FieldNav, the digital machine; and FieldHand, the digital operator. Outlines the hardware and software used; standard and custom components used for safety and customized electronics; modifications for drive‐by‐wire; the event‐driven, behaviour‐based architecture (SAUSAGES); sensing for crop line tracking; other detectors, trackers and GPS used for guidance. Finally, explains the benefits of such automation to agriculture and what the future holds for commercialization of Demeter.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the transferability of ICT‐solutions for providing support information services from eHealth to eMaintenance.

The applied research approach takes the form of a single‐case study supported by a literature study. Empirical data were collected through documents, observations and interviews. The conclusions of the study were verified by key informants.

The study indicates some major problems that have to be overcome when implementing support information services using an ICT‐solution (e.g. to manage heterogeneous organizations; manage heterogeneous eService‐environments; and enable context and situation awareness in eServices). Further, the study has identified and graded some solutions, which address these problems and are transferable from eHealth to eMaintenance.

The studied case is in the forefront of eHealth solutions and can therefore act as a guidance for those involved at different stages of eHealth implementation. At the same time, eHealth is an application domain with stringent safety and security requirements, which makes the findings valuable for persons involved in support information services related to complex and critical technical systems, e.g. aircraft systems.

The paper reports on experiences from an actual eHealth solution and not just about the concept of eHealth. Hence, it has implications for both practitioners and researchers.

Changes in workflow relevant data of business processes at run-time can hinder their completion or impact their profitability as they have been instantiated under different circumstances. The purpose of this paper is to propose a context engine to enhance a business process management (BPM) system’s context-awareness. The generic architecture provides the flexibility to configure processes during initialization as well as to adapt running instances at decision gates or during execution due to significant context change.

The paper discusses context-awareness as the conceptual background. The technological capabilities of business rules and complex event processing (CEP) are outlined in an architecture design. A reference process is proposed and discussed in an exemplary application.

The results provide an improvement over the current situation of static variable instantiation of business processes with local information. The proposed architecture extends the well-known combination of business rules and BPM systems with a context engine based on CEP.

The resulting architecture for a BPM system using a context engine is generic in nature and, hence, requires to be contextualized for situated implementations. Implementation success is dependent on the availability of context information and process compensation options.

Practitioners receive advice on a reference architecture and technology choices for implementing systems, which can provide and monitor context information for business processes as well as intervene and adapt the execution.

Currently, there is no multi-purpose non-proprietary context engine based on CEP or any other technology available for BPM, which facilitates the adaptation of processes at run-time due to changes in context variables. This paper will stimulate a debate between research and practice on suitable design and technology.

The purpose of this paper is to perform an extensive literature review in the area of decision making for condition-based maintenance (CBM) and identify possibilities for proactive online recommendations by considering real-time sensor data. Based on these, the paper aims at proposing a framework for proactive decision making in the context of CBM.

Starting with the manufacturing challenges and the main principles of maintenance, the paper reviews the main frameworks and concepts regarding CBM that have been proposed in the literature. Moreover, the terms of e-maintenance, proactivity and decision making are analysed and their potential relevance to CBM is identified. Then, an extensive literature review of methods and techniques for the various steps of CBM is provided, especially for prognosis and decision support. Based on these, limitations and gaps are identified and a framework for proactive decision making in the context of CBM is proposed.

In the proposed framework for proactive decision making, the CBM concept is enriched in the sense that it is structured into two components: the information space and the decision space. Moreover, it is extended in a way that decision space is further analyzed according to the types of recommendations that can be provided. Moreover, possible inputs and outputs of each step are identified.

The paper provides a framework for CBM representing the steps that need to be followed for proactive recommendations as well as the types of recommendations that can be given. The framework can be used by maintenance management of a company in order to conduct CBM by utilizing real-time sensor data depending on the type of decision required.

The results of the work presented in this paper form the basis for the development and implementation of proactive Decision Support System (DSS) in the context of maintenance.

Programming Sensor Networks currently is a subtle task not because of enormous amount of code but due to inherent limitations of embedded hardware like the power, memory, network bandwidth and clock speed. In addition, there are very few programming abstractions and standards available which lead to close coupling between the application code and the embedded OS requiring understanding of low‐level primitives during implementation. A Middleware can provide glue code between the applications and the heterogeneity of devices by providing optimized set of services for autonomously managing the resources and functionality of wireless nodes in a distributed wireless sensor network. This paper presents an autonomous middleware framework for low power distributed wireless sensor networks that support adaptive sensor functionality, context aware communications, clustering, quality of service and faulttolerance. Finally an application on how to use the autonomous middleware is illustrated on the Envelope System Research Apparatus (ESRA).