Enabling intelligent business processes with context awareness

Sensing technologies provide system applications with the awareness of environmental conditions, customer behaviours, object movements, etc. Further, with such capability, system applications can be smart to intelligently adapt their responses to the changing conditions. With regard to business operations, these system applications ensure that business processes can run more intelligently and adaptively. These features will undoubtedly improve customer experience, enhance the reliability of service delivery and lower the operational cost for a more competitive and sustainable business. To enable context awareness to business process management, this paper proposes a conceptual method of depicting the context of a business process and the related mechanism of perceiving the contextual dynamics. A running example demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method and the improvements to process performance are evaluated using process simulations.