Collaborative Business Processes Research Articles

Smart Contract Generation and Visualization for Construction Business Process Collaboration and Automation: Upgraded Workflow Engine

Smart Contract Generation and Visualization for Construction Business Process Collaboration and Automation: Upgraded Workflow Engine

Enforcing Correctness of Collaborative Business Processes Using Plans

Enforcing Correctness of Collaborative Business Processes Using Plans

Examining Collaborative Business Process Modeling Techniques

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the recognition and use of Business Process Management (BPM) in both academic research and practical applications. The use of innovative ICT plays a crucial role in efficacy enhancement and efficiency of corporate collaboration and the management of inter-organizational business processes. Within this particular context, it is essential for organizations that engage in cooperation to possess a collective comprehension of their internal processes, as well as those of their collaborating partners. Additionally, they must also possess an awareness of the evolving inter-organizational process structures that may arise. To foster a collective comprehension, the use of collaborative modeling might prove to be a valuable strategy. The scope of business processes extends to include activities that go outside the confines of a company, hence necessitating the adoption of process of modelling collaborative business. The practice of BPM involves several intricate iterations and extensive collaboration between business analysts and domain experts. Processes of collaborative business serve as enablers for businesses to cultivate adaptable and dynamic partnerships, allowing them to effectively respond to changing circumstances and maintain competitiveness within the global market. The primary objective of this study is to conduct a comprehensive examination of contemporary cBPM methodologies.

A Model-Based Approach to Enhance the Communication Between the Participants of Collaborative Business Processes

A Model-Based Approach to Enhance the Communication Between the Participants of Collaborative Business Processes

Moving Beyond Proof of Concept and Pilots to Mainstream: Discovery and Lessons from a Reference Framework and Implementation.

This article presents a practitioner's view of operating in emerging technology, exploring and advancing blockchain-based transformation in healthcare. Blockchain technology is maturing quickly, with financial technology (aka fintech) leading the way with efficient options for moving money, particularly in the public permissionless blockchain segment. The underlying technology allows for a broader set of capabilities, including provenance, data sharing, immutability, non-repudiation, and auditability, which provides for complete rethinking of existing business processes. These features can help to reimagine a more comprehensive set of use cases in many disciplines, including healthcare. However, enterprise adoption needs to catch up.

Blockchain-based collaborative business process data sharing and access control

Blockchain-based collaborative business process data sharing and access control

Examining Collaborative Business Process Modeling Techniques

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the recognition and use of Business Process Management (BPM) in both academic research and practical applications. The use of innovative ICT plays a crucial role in efficacy enhancement and efficiency of corporate collaboration and the management of inter-organizational business processes. Within this particular context, it is essential for organizations that engage in cooperation to possess a collective comprehension of their internal processes, as well as those of their collaborating partners. Additionally, they must also possess an awareness of the evolving inter-organizational process structures that may arise. To foster a collective comprehension, the use of collaborative modeling might prove to be a valuable strategy. The scope of business processes extends to include activities that go outside the confines of a company, hence necessitating the adoption of process of modelling collaborative business. The practice of BPM involves several intricate iterations and extensive collaboration between business analysts and domain experts. Processes of collaborative business serve as enablers for businesses to cultivate adaptable and dynamic partnerships, allowing them to effectively respond to changing circumstances and maintain competitiveness within the global market. The primary objective of this study is to conduct a comprehensive examination of contemporary cBPM methodologies.

Mitigating cybercrimes in an evolving organizational landscape

PurposeVarious organizational landscapes have evolved to improve their business processes, increase production speed and reduce the cost of distribution and have integrated their Internet with small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) and third-party vendors to improve business growth and increase global market share, including changing organizational requirements and business process collaborations. Benefits include a reduction in the cost of production, online services, online payments, product distribution channels and delivery in a supply chain environment. However, the integration has led to an exponential increase in cybercrimes, with adversaries using various attack methods to penetrate and exploit the organizational network. Thus, identifying the attack vectors in the event of cyberattacks is very important in mitigating cybercrimes effectively and has become inevitable. However, the invincibility nature of cybercrimes makes it challenging to detect and predict the threat probabilities and the cascading impact in an evolving organization landscape leading to malware, ransomware, data theft and denial of service attacks, among others. The paper explores the cybercrime threat landscape, considers the impact of the attacks and identifies mitigating circumstances to improve security controls in an evolving organizational landscape.Design/methodology/approachThe approach follows two main cybercrime framework design principles that focus on existing attack detection phases and proposes a cybercrime mitigation framework (CCMF) that uses detect, assess, analyze, evaluate and respond phases and subphases to reduce the attack surface. The methods and implementation processes were derived by identifying an organizational goal, attack vectors, threat landscape, identification of attacks and models and validation of framework standards to improve security. The novelty contribution of this paper is threefold: first, the authors explore the existing threat landscapes, various cybercrimes, models and the methods that adversaries are deploying on organizations. Second, the authors propose a threat model required for mitigating the risk factors. Finally, the authors recommend control mechanisms in line with security standards to improve security.FindingsThe results show that cybercrimes can be mitigated using a CCMF to detect, assess, analyze, evaluate and respond to cybercrimes to improve security in an evolving organizational threat landscape.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper does not consider the organizational size between large organizations and SMEs. The challenges facing the evolving organizational threat landscape include vulnerabilities brought about by the integrations of various network nodes. Factor influencing these vulnerabilities includes inadequate threat intelligence gathering, a lack of third-party auditing and inadequate control mechanisms leading to various manipulations, exploitations, exfiltration and obfuscations.Practical implicationsAttack methods are applied to a case study for the implementation to evaluate the model based on the design principles. Inadequate cyber threat intelligence (CTI) gathering, inadequate attack modeling and security misconfigurations are some of the key factors leading to practical implications in mitigating cybercrimes.Social implicationsThere are no social implications; however, cybercrimes have severe consequences for organizations and third-party vendors that integrate their network systems, leading to legal and reputational damage.Originality/valueThe paper’s originality considers mitigating cybercrimes in an evolving organization landscape that requires strategic, tactical and operational management imperative using the proposed framework phases, including detect, assess, analyze, evaluate and respond phases and subphases to reduce the attack surface, which is currently inadequate.

A Blockchain-Based Trust Model for Supporting Collaborative Healthcare Data Management

The development of information technology allows the collaborative business process to be run across multiple enterprises in a larger market environment. However, while collaborative business expands the realm of businesses, it also causes various hazards in collaborative Interaction, such as data falsification, inconstancy, and misuse. To solve these issues, a blockchain-based collaborative business modeling approach was proposed and analyzed. However, the existing studies lack the blockchain risk problem-solving specification, and there is no verification technique to examine the process. Consequently, it is difficult to confirm the appropriateness of the approach. Thus, here, we propose and build a blockchain-based trust model to strengthen and verify the integrity and security of the collaborative business process; Integrity and security address the validity of collaborative interactions in terms of a trust, and we construct a blockchain pattern based on trust elements to meet the required the characteristics. Specifically, a trust model can be applied to the healthcare data-sharing process, and then the achievement of the trust-based safe data-sharing process can be proven. Our model can be used as a trust-building guidance tool or for integrity and security verification with the collaborative business process in a distributed environment with blockchain.

Blockchain-Based, Confidentiality-Preserving Orchestration of Collaborative Workflows

Business process collaboration between independent parties is challenging when participants do not completely trust each other. Tracking actions and enforcing the activity authorizations of participants via blockchain-hosted smart contracts is an emerging solution to this lack of trust, with most state-of-the-art approaches generating the orchestrating smart contract logic from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) models. However, compared to centralized business process orchestration services, smart contract state typically leaks potentially sensitive information about the state of the collaboration, limiting the applicability of decentralized process orchestration. This paper presents a novel, collaboration confidentiality-preserving approach where the process orchestrator smart contract only stores encrypted and hashed process states and validates participant actions against a BPMN model using zero-knowledge proofs. We cover a subset of BPMN, which is sufficient from the practical point of view, support messagepassing between participants, and provide an open-source, endto-end prototype implementation that automatically generates the key software artifacts.

Designing secure business processes for blockchains with SecBPMN2BC

Collaborative business processes can be seen as smart contracts, as they are oftentimes adopted to express agreements among different organizations. Indeed, they provide mechanisms to formalize the obligations of each involved party. For instance, collaborative business processes can specify when a certain task should be executed, under which conditions a service should be offered to the other participants, and how physical objects and information should be manipulated. In this setting, to prevent misuse of smart contracts and services and information provided, it is paramount to guarantee by design that security requirements are fulfilled. With the rise in popularity of blockchains, several approaches exploiting the trusted smart contract execution environment offered by this technology to enforce collaborative business processes have been proposed. Yet, the complexity of business processes, security requirements, and blockchain applications calls for an engineering approach that guides the design of secure business processes. Such an approach should both take advantage of the possibilities offered by blockchain technology to enforce some security requirements (e.g., non-repudiation), and take into account the limitations blockchain poses for other security requirements (e.g., confidentiality). However, we are not aware of any existing work that aims at addressing such issues following a similar approach.In this article, we propose SecBPMN2BC: a model-driven approach to designing business processes with security requirements that are meant to be deployed on blockchains. SecBPMN2BC consists of: (i) an extension of BPMN 2.0 that allows designing secure smart contracts; (ii) a set of algorithms and their implementation that check incompatible security requirements and help the design of smart contracts; (iii) a workflow that guides the application of the method. The method has been validated with a survey conducted on security and BPMN experts.

A formal verification approach for composite smart contracts security using FSM

Many of today's companies use Smart Contracts to represent and execute their business processes. Smart contracts are self-executed programs running over blockchain. In this context, composite smart contracts are used to represent collaborative business processes. A composite smart contract is a smart contract that needs to execute other contracts using external calls to achieve its tasks. Composite smart contracts, through the use of external calls and the execution of other smart contracts that might belong to other owners or companies, bring many challenges with regard to security requirements. As a result, special efforts must be done to ensure composite smart contracts security verification. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to verify the security and the correctness of the composite smart contracts written in solidity in Ethereum blockchain. This approach is based on the finite state machine models and model checking method for modeling and verifying the composite smart contracts respectively. We consider seven security properties as well as the security issues that depend on the contract context to be checked in the composite smart contract. For this, we provide two different yet complementary types of verification. The first type of verification is applied to all smart contracts with properties called in our approach “standard properties” that represent the generic ones, while the second type considers the context-dependent properties that we called “specific properties” varying from one smart contract to another. Finally, we express all properties using computation tree logic formulae and we use the nuXmv symbolic model checker to verify the model against all properties. This approach is validated using a different set of solidity smart contracts.

The E-Commerce Investment and Enterprise Performance Based on Customer Relationship Management

In the current dynamic and complex competitive environment, the implementation of enterprise e-commerce plays an important role in the development of external business process activities. Through the Internet, information sharing and business process collaboration between enterprises and customers can be realized. This kind of e-service activity based on e-commerce process is particularly important for customers. However, many business managers have some doubts about the implementation of customer service-oriented online business activities, because customer service-oriented online business activities need a lot of IT investment, and the performance of this e-business activities is not easy to measure.

Evaluation of Compliance Requirements for collaborative business process with process mining and a model of generic compliance controls

The daily operation of organizations leaves a trail of the execution of business processes (BPs) including activities, events and decisions taken by participants. %, as a basis for process improvement. Compliance requirements add specific control elements to process execution, e.g. domain and/or country regulations to be fulfilled, enforcing order of interaction messages or activities, or security checks on roles and permissions. As the amount of available data in organizations grows everyday, using execution data to detect compliance violations and its causes, can help organizations to take corrective actions for improving their processes and comply to applying rules. Compliance requirements violations can be detected at runtime to prevent further execution, or in a post mortem way using Process Mining to evaluate process execution data against the specified compliance requirements for the process. In this paper we present a BP compliance Requirements Model (BPCRM) defining generic compliance controls that can be used to specify specific compliance requirements over BPs, that are used as input to assess compliance violations with process mining. This model can be seen as a catalogue that includes a set of predefined compliance rules or patterns in one place, helping organizations to specify and evaluate the compliance of their processes.

An investigation of the relationship between joint visual attention and product quality in collaborative business process modeling: a dual eye-tracking study

An investigation of the relationship between joint visual attention and product quality in collaborative business process modeling: a dual eye-tracking study

The E-Commerce Investment and Enterprise Performance Based on Customer Relationship Management

In the current dynamic and complex competitive environment, the implementation of enterprise e-commerce plays an important role in the development of external business process activities. Through the Internet, information sharing and business process collaboration between enterprises and customers can be realized. This kind of e-service activity based on e-commerce process is particularly important for customers. However, many business managers have some doubts about the implementation of customer service-oriented online business activities, because customer service-oriented online business activities need a lot of IT investment, and the performance of this e-business activities is not easy to measure.

Integration of business process and organizational data for evidence-based business intelligence


 
 
 Organizations require a unified view of business processes and organizational data for the improvement of their daily operations. However, it is infrequent for both kinds of data to be consistently unified. Organizational data (e.g., clients, orders, and payments) is usually stored in many different data sources. Process data (e.g., cases, activity in- stances, and variables) is generally handled manually or implicit in information systems and coupled with organizational data without clear separation. It impairs the combined application of process mining and data mining techniques for a complete evaluation of their business process execution. In this paper, we deal with the integration of both kinds of data into a unified view. First, we analyze data integration scenarios and data matching problems considering intra-organizational and inter-organizational collaborative business processes. We also propose a model-driven approach to integrate several data sources, generating a unified model for evidence-based business intelligence.
 
 

Decentralized collaborative business process execution using blockchain

Decentralized collaborative business process execution using blockchain

Guarded attribute grammars and publish/subscribe for implementing distributed collaborative business processes with high data availability

With the ever-increasing development of the Internet and the diversification of communication media, business processes of companies are increasingly collaborative and distributed. This contrasts with traditional solutions deployed for their management which are usually centralized, based either on the control and coordination of the flow of activities, or on the documents exchanged or artifacts. Moreover, the users who are usually the main actors in collaborations are often relegated to second place. Recently, a distributed, data-driven and user-centric approach called guarded attribute grammar (GAG) has been proposed for the modeling of such processes; it thus provides an answer to most of these limitations. In this paper, we present an approach for implementing business processes modeled using GAG in which communications are done by publish/subscribe with redirection of subscription (pub/sub-RS). In fact, the pub/sub-RS—which we propose—is a new variant of the publish/subscribe protocol particularly adapted to the asynchronous and incremental exchange of semi-structured data. It allows to guarantee high data availability during the process execution by ensuring that an actor, perceived as a subscriber, will always receive a data he needs to perform a task as soon as it is produced. Moreover, if the data are semi-structured and produced collaboratively and incrementally by several actors, its subscribers will be notified as soon as one of its components (a prefix) is produced, simultaneously as they will be subscribed in a transparent way to the remaining components (the suffix).

Sustainable energy supply and business collaborations for sustainability, resilience and competitiveness in the Zambian copper industry after Covid-19

The mining industry in Zambia is energy-intensive, with hydro energy providing the required energy. But other sources of energy may need to be added, because hydro energy is subject to good rain patterns, threatened by the spectre of climate change, as already indicated by the current prolonged hours of load shedding by state-owned , Zambia Electricity Supply Company. This research looks at state-of-art mining technologies and collaborative business processes that leverage on the expected ramp in copper and cobalt (Cu-Co) global demand post-Covid-19, to help design resilient business systems by manufacturing, source goods and services within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region to lower Cu-Co production costs, and maximise profits through shared resources and bilateral trade agreements. With evidence, projection and predictions by global leaders in the Cu-Co industry, this study evaluates the preparedness and resilience of the Zambian mining industry for sustainable energy supply, environmental sustainability, and suggests some possible business collaborations within the SADC region to share the following resources: metal refineries, transportation of goods and services, expertise and energy supplies within SADC, to enhance business sustainability. The study shows that the resilience of Cu-Co business in resource-rich nations like Zambia is complex and is heavily influenced by investment decisions, stakeholder interests, copper ore grades and extractive process types, reliable power supply, and socio-economic and political issues. The significance of this study is that it proposes some business collaborations within SADC that can increase energy reliability and supply, Cu-Co production, increase business resilience, improve global competitiveness and sustainability by exploring energy efficiency and generation-mix strategy. Highlights A sustainable energy analysis for Zambia. Establishing the role of mine multi-national enterprises concerning environmental sustainability. Proposing copper business resilience collaborations within SADC. Developing a mining business resilience and sustainability model for sustainable power supply, high production, profitability and global competitiveness.