Business processes are frequently executed within application systems that involve humans and computer systems, as well as objects in the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT, as well as cyber-physical systems (CPS), denotes the inter-networking of all kinds of physical devices, which has become increasingly significant. Process execution, monitoring, and analytics based on IoT-derived big data can enable a more comprehensive view of processes. Embedding intelligence through coding by means of real-time data gathering from devices and sensors and then consuming them through business process management (BPM) technology helps businesses to increase cost saving and efficiency. Meanwhile, BPM, the cornerstone of modern process-aware information systems (PAIS), has established itself as a powerful technology in the design, analysis, configuration, enactment, and evolution of cooperative processes.

We anticipate that by integrating IoT capabilities to sense real-time situations of the physical environment, traditional PAIS will potentially have enhanced situation awareness and become more proactive, leading to increased usability and a wider range of possible applications. The ever-growing amount of data generated by IoT, which holds great economic potential for future applications, can also be better leveraged and handled by means of BPM, as the latter gives domain experts’ direct control over business processes. However, the integration of BPM and IoT is facing paradigm misalignment challenges including the mismatch of programming mechanisms, mismatches in resource management mechanisms, and mismatch of adaptation mechanisms.

This Special Issue aims to provide a platform for both researchers and app developers to discuss the opportunities, issues, challenges, and possible solutions for bridging BPM and IoT. This Special Issue will provide an opportunity to present technical strategies and empirical evidence that proposes new tools, methods, approaches, frameworks, and techniques to link BPM and IoT. We welcome both original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• New AI-based tools, approaches, frameworks, and models proposed for bridging BPM and IoT
• Use of resource management mechanisms to support optimized scheduling in the collaborative cloud and edge environment
• Resource scheduling methods to achieve specific optimization goals for business processes under different businesses or environmental constraints
• Approaches to address the dynamic and largescale nature of the service space in an IoT environment
• Distributed and/or decentralized resource management architecture for optimizing the execution performance of business processes
• Industry best practices reporting bridging BPM and IoT issues and challenges
• Surveys, empirical studies, and systematic literature reviews in connection with BPM and IoT