A Model Based Framework for IoT-Aware Business Process Management

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

Issue #1: Issues with basic concept definition and soundness: A major weakness of the paper in its current form is that key concepts as foundation for the research foundation seem mostly theoretically in nature. The motivation for this paper is still unclear and good to see discussion/analysis on this work's connection to IoT-aware Business Process Management.

Issue #2: Contributions and literature retrieval: Main contribution remains highly unclear. Important to have discussion about (1) what are key advantages of the proposed method and (2) main novelty of the proposed method? Also, literature review on the domains is too brief with comprehensive analysis and can be enhanced.

 

 

Issue #3: Lack of important technical details: To help reader understand technical details, please detail introduction of a few key formula and fundamental ideas/design principles. Core technical scheme and algorithms are proposed based on existing ones. Why is core innovation? Without the details mentioned, it is difficult to assess its key technical advancement over existing approaches and impacts.

 

The literature review is incomplete, with some important related studies missing. Please update your literature review by adding the core works.

 

Design principle of the proposed framework need to be enhanced with comprehensive break down and analysis of the each key components. Current introduction needs to be revised in clear and comprehensive way to give structural discussion.

 

Experimental study is weak: what are the main questions addressed in the work? What is key task used for experimental study? What is experimental study procedure? Good to add the details of test collection, evaluation metrics and other important dimensions.

 

 

A rationale of the selection of the methods and tuning of all the parameters an explanation of the selected features (from the user standpoint) should be added.

Authors must discuss the complete flowchart diagram.

What are the strongest and weakest aspects of this work?

The "Conclusions and Future Work" section appears excessively concise, then the authors should expand it by recapping all the steps to the proposed work, as to offer a brief but complete summary of it to the readers.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents a novel and interesting conceptual contribution in the form of the IoT metamodel for deriving UML profile or BPMN extensions. 

Although these are the most popular standards for modeling, there are also other notations, such as YAWL, EPC, Petri nets. Therefore, choosing the selected ones should be clearly motivated. 

The authors also introduce a framework for the simulation-based analysis of IoT-aware business processes and present the prototype implementation. 

Although the framework is well presented, it could be better evaluated. 

The authors could provide a list of requirements that are fulfilled by their framework. 

It is important to notice that the authors present a wide overview of IoT frameworks and ontologies for the purpose of process analysis from the process-based perspective. The authors also took into account the semantic interoperability and semantization of sensor network. However, also business process semantization could be taken into account for the analysis. 

There are several minor presentation issues:

- Caption of Figure 10 might be misleading as it claims, it presents an annotated BPMN Model while in the picture there are no annotations.

- There is an inconsistent emphasizing of elements (some elements are presented in bold font, e.g. lines 357, 371, and 381, some in italics, e.g., 215, 218, and some both, e.g., lines 328, 334).

- There is an inconsistent expansion of abbreviations - I suggest providing either acronym first and then explanation in parenthesis or another way, but not mix these two types within the paper.

- I found several typos: "[105]" (line 119), "))" (line 170), "fon enabling" (line 216), FeatuerOfInterest" (line 412), "CategoySensorData" (line 424).

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

1.     The authors have correctly addressed the issues I made w.r.t. to the previous version of the manuscript. I thank the authors for their effort in improving the manuscript. The only pending issue is a thorough revision of language. The writing still shows quite a few deficiencies and I strongly recommend a professional proofread before publication.