On the Interplay Between BPMN Collaborations and the Physical Environment

Nowadays, business scenarios are permeated and influenced by information from the surrounding physical environment that influences decision-making and vice-versa. This is especially evident in the presence of participants able to move in and interact with the physical environment. In this regard, BPMN is a widely accepted standard for representing multi-party business processes in terms of collaboration diagrams, offering an expressive and understandable notation. However, BPMN, as well as its extensions, overlook the support to the physical environment. In this paper, we describe the interplay between BPMN collaborations and the physical environment. Specifically, we bridge the BPMN meta-model with environmental concepts, defining environmental BPMN collaboration models. To facilitate a deeper understanding of the dynamics of these models, we provide a formal account of their semantics. We illustrate our findings through a fire-extinguishing collaborative scenario.