First Prototype

Over the last summer term, five students worked diligently to create the first working prototype of the PROCEED project as part of a seminar. The goal was to create a lightweight distributed process engine that should be installed on some small IoT devices.In the end the students successfully achieved to run the following motion detection use case:

The first process step waits for a motion detection. If this happens a picture of the trigger is taken, sent to a display where the process participant have to choose if she recognizes the trigger. Depending on the decision a green or red light is turned on.

Below the BPMN process you can find the list of devices and systems where each process step runs. The motion detection, the photo and the lights are executed on multiple Raspberry Pis. Since the third step needs a display to show the image and interact with a user it needs a system with some kind of haptic input method and a display. The decision was made to run this step on an Android phone to include mobile devices into the prototype. The following exclusive gateway runs on a usual Windows, Linux or Mac PC.

During the project we set up a continuous integration and deployment infrastructure to get immediate feedback and demonstrate the running system:

The project achieved some great results and a first prototype of the envisioned process engine for PROCEED. As part of the first stage of the project it lays some important foundations for the upcoming phases, where we’ll refine the architecture and implement additional features.