Human-Centric Processes: Where IoT and People Meet

“Human-centric processes” (HCPs) heavily involve human beings. Humans can partake in an HCP by observing and interacting with some socio-technical system, such as a supply chain or a hospital. These two actions are also at the core of IoT, where digital systems observe things by using sensors and interact with things utilizing actuators. Human-centric processes bring together observations and interactions from both humans and IoT.

HCPs can be studied from different points of view. In light of the increasing adoption of process technologies (in particular, process mining), we argue that it is crucial to study how existing process life cycles can be adopted in the context of HCPs.

This chapter will focus on the challenges and opportunities emerging in modeling, discovering, checking for conformance, and enacting human-centric processes. Two case studies will be used to describe the opportunities, one referring to logistics and the other referring to personalized medicine. Based on these, we will provide a vision of the life cycles of human-centric processes and the role of IoT in them.