On the interplay between multi-instance BPMN collaborations and the environment

Nowadays, business processes are increasingly influenced by information from the surrounding physical environment and vice versa. This is especially evident in the presence of multi-instance participants able to move in and interact within a 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, overlooks the support for the physical environment. In this paper, we describe the interplay between BPMN collaborations, including multiple instances of the same participant, and the physical environment. Specifically, we extend 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, addressing the handling of multiple instances of the same participant and incorporating time as a factor influencing process execution during interplay with the environment. Beyond defining a novel formalization, we propose BEAR, a tool that implements the formal semantics and supports modeling, animation, and debugging of environmental BPMN collaborations, extended to support multi-instance participants and time progression. We illustrate our findings through a fire-extinguishing multi-instance collaborative scenario.