Modeling business entities and physical workflow in the context of Internet of Things: The GSM-IoT framework

Guard Stage Milestone (GSM) approach proved its ability to specify business entities lifecycle and the associated data. Although this framework is a promising approach for business process operations modeling, the concept of physical flows is missing. In workflow modeling, we usually have three main views, the strategic, the tactical, and the operational views. These views show different aspect of the business workflow from coarse grained level to finest grained level of granularity. The purpose of this article is to extend GSM framework by adding physical workflow concepts and take into account particularities of Internet of Things (IoT) smart entities and their mutual interactions. This extended framework called GSM-IoT framework eases physical workflow modeling, particularly the strategic and operational views we are interesting in this article. GSM-IoT framework also aims to enable services orchestration, data and event sharing among stakeholders in the context of Internet of Things. This will therefore ease business collaboration and interoperability enhancement in the Supply Chain (SC) ecosystem.