A GSM-based approach for monitoring cross-organization business processes using smart objects

The execution of cross-organization business processes often implies the exchange of physical goods without necessarily changing the ownership of such goods. Typical examples are logistic processes where goods are managed by shipping companies that are not the owner of the goods. To ensure that these goods are properly handled, while the service is executed, a monitoring system needs to be put in place. The goal of this paper is to propose a novel approach for monitoring physical goods while executing cross-organization business processes. The approach envisions the usage of Smart Objects attached to the physical goods, or to their containers. To this aim, an extension of the Guard-Stage-Milestone framework is proposed to allow the Smart Objects to monitor the process execution and take into account the limitations of their power and computational resources.