Cross-organizational Business Processes Research Articles

Privacy-Preserving Process Mining: A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Aware Reversible Shared Image Approach

ABSTRACT Deeper integration of cross-organizational business process sharing and process mining has advanced the Industrial Internet. Privacy breaches and data security risks limit its use. Scrambling or anonymizing event data frequently preserves privacy in established studies. The scrambling mechanism or random noise injection corrupts event log process information and lowers process mining outcomes. This research presents a blockchain-based privacy-aware reversible shared image approach using chaotic image and privacy-aware theory for privacy-preserving process mining. Avoiding data loss, disclosure concerns, correlation attacks, and encrypted sharing is possible with the method. First, process data is turned into color images with chaotic image encryption to safeguard privacy and allow reversible reproduction. Second, the on-chain-off-chain paradigm helps handle information lightly; finally, attribute encryption of multi-view event data for correlation resistance and on-demand data encryption sharing. Simulations on common datasets reveal that: 1. The system performance of the proposed method outperforms the baseline method by 57%. 2. The strategy greatly enhances categorical and numerical data privacy. 3. It performs better in event data privacy protection and process mining fitness and precision. The proposed method ensures the secure flow of cross-organizational information in the Industrial Internet and provides a novel privacy-secure computational approach for the growing Artificial Intelligence.

ProcessChain: a blockchain-based framework for privacy preserving cross-organizational business process mining from distributed event logs

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to design a consortium-blockchain based framework for cross-organizational business process mining complying with privacy requirements.Design/methodology/approachBusiness process modeling in a cross-organizational setting is complicated due to privacy concerns. The process mining in this situation occurs through trusted third parties (TTPs). It uses a special class of Petri-nets called workflow nets (WF-nets) to represent the formal specifications of event logs in a blockchain-enabled cross-organization.FindingsUsing a smart contract algorithm, the proposed framework discovers the organization-specific business process models (BPM) without a TTP. The discovered BPMs are formally represented using WF-nets with a message factor to support the authors’ claim. Finally, the applicability and suitability of the proposed framework is demonstrated using a case study of multimodal transportation.Originality/valueThe proposed framework complies with privacy requirements. It shows how to represent the formal specifications of event logs in a blockchain using a special class of Petri-nets called WF-nets. It also presents a smart contract algorithm to discover organization-specific business process models (BPM) without a TTP.

Verifying compliance in process choreographies: Foundations, algorithms, and implementation

The current push towards interoperability drives companies to collaborate through process choreographies. At the same time, they face a jungle of continuously changing regulations, e.g., due to the pandemic and developments such as the BREXIT, which strongly affect cross-organizational collaborations. Think of, for example, supply chains spanning several countries with different and maybe even conflicting COVID19 traveling restrictions. Hence, providing automatic compliance verification in process choreographies is crucial for any cross-organizational business process. A particular challenge concerns the restricted visibility of the partner processes at the presence of global compliance rules (GCR), i.e., rules that span across the process of several partners. This work deals with the question how to verify global compliance if affected tasks are not fully visible. Our idea is to decompose GCRs into so called assertions that can be checked by each affected partner whereby the decomposition is both correct and lossless. The algorithm exploits transitivity properties of the underlying rule specification, and its correctness and complexity are proven, considering advanced aspects such as loops. The algorithm is implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype, including a model checker for verifying compliance. The applicability of the approach is further demonstrated on a real-world manufacturing use case.

Determining temporal agreements in cross-organizational business processes

Cross-organizational business processes emerge from the cooperation of intra-organizational business processes exchanging messages. The cooperating processes establish temporal agreements in the form of constraints, representing timeliness obligations on the one hand and guarantees on the other hand. These constraints also form requirements for the design of the hidden implementation of the processes and are the basis of local control decisions. We present a comprehensive methodology for modeling the temporal aspects of cross-organizational business processes, checking the dynamic controllability of such processes, and supporting the reaching and the checking of temporal agreements. We do so by computing the consequences of temporal constraints and business secrecy requirements and by computing the weakest preconditions for the dynamic controllability of a participating process.

A novel service level agreement model using blockchain and smart contract for cloud manufacturing in industry 4.0

ABSTRACT The number of service offerings in cloud manufacturing continues to grow, so that service level agreement (SLA) within cloud manufacturing is increasingly used to ensure the coordination of the cross-organisational business processes between the cloud service providers (CSP) and cloud service consumers (CSC). The definition of SLA and monitoring SLA’s performance are significant and should be highly valued to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of business services. At present, the third-party monitoring methods based on service credit are mainly applied in cloud manufacturing environments. There is no effective supervision mechanism to monitor the third party and no efficient punishment mechanism on SLA violation. To address aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a novel Service Level Agreement model by integrating Blockchain and Smart Contract (SLABSC), in which trust issues among CSP, CSC, and the third-party monitoring can be addressed through Blockchain technologies. The method proposed in this paper realises the full functionality of SLABSC and facilitates data security, and it can be used to supervise CSP to provide better services. Experiments results show that the performance of the proposed model is valid and efficient.

Extracting process hierarchies by multi-sequence alignment adaptations

ABSTRACT Process mining is an active research area that provides a wide range of automated process discovery, conformance checking and process enhancement solutions by extracting process information from event logs. With the emerge of new shared economy models and system architectures, monolithic perspective of process mining, i.e. a single process within a single organisation, is evolved towards cross-organisational business processes. The results can be used to form new collaboration among the organisations and share best practices, business knowledge or a common infrastructure. However, the variability across the cross-organisational process variants constitutes a challenge to deal with, especially at flexible environments. This paper demonstrates a quantitative approach to measure how similar organisations execute the same process. The approach is based on the multi-sequence alignment of dominant behaviour, which is a typical sequence of behaviour recurring at the process cases. Then process clusters are extracted in the form of process hierarchy according to the degree of process similarities. A novel feature of the proposed approach is that branching in process hierarchy reflects how organisations’ behaviours differ from each other. Additionally, common fragments at the aligned process variants within the same cluster pinpoint a functional inheritance or a shared process behaviour for the corresponding organisations. The proposed approach is applied on a real-life case and the comparison with previous alignment techniques reveals the advantages of the approach.

A Method for Verifying the Behavioral Consistency between Public Business Process and Private Business Process Based on Environment

The cross-organizational business process is characterized by privacy, collaboration, autonomy, dynamic interaction structure, etc. It is necessary to model and analyze the cross-organizational business process in order to ensure the accuracy and consistency of process interaction among different organizations. The open workflow net proposed on the basis of Petri net is used as a tool to model the cross-organizational business process. The cross-organizational business process is divided into two parts, namely private process and public process. The private process is regarded as the internal view of the organization, and the public process is regarded as the external view of the interaction between an organization and other organizations. The interaction behavior of model verification is regarded as the starting point with regard to the behavioral consistency problem of the model. A method for verifying the behavioral consistency based on environment is proposed, which is more relaxed than the existing method for verifying the behavioral consistency based on mutual simulation and more consistent with the asynchronous communication among organizations.

Simulating, Off-Chain and On-Chain: Agent-Based Simulations in Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Information systems execute increasingly complex business processes, often across organizations. Blockchain technology has emerged as a potential facilitator of (semi)-autonomous cross-organizational business process execution; in particular, so-called consortium blockchains can be considered as promising enablers in this context, as they do not require the use of cryptocurrency-based blockchain technology, as long as the trusted (authenticated) members of the network are willing to provide computing resources for consensus-finding. However, increased autonomy in the execution of business processes also requires the delegation of business decisions to machines. To support complex decision-making processes by assessing potential future outcomes, agent-based simulations can be considered a useful tool for the autonomous enterprise. In this paper, we explore the intersection of multi-agent simulations and consortium blockchain technology in the context of enterprise applications by devising architectures and technology stacks for both off-chain and on-chain agent-based simulation in the context of blockchain-based business process execution.

Innovative Management of Common-Pool Resources by Smart Contracts

The access to common-pool resources, i.e. to resources in limited common property, are legally distributed in a far more diverse way than limited private property resources. In transportation, a critical case for common-pool resources appear in Green Transport Corridors (GTC), that has been coined by European Union as being «sustainable logistics solutions for cargo transportation’ with a shared pool of resources aiming for multimodal trans-shipment routes with a concentration of freight traffic between significant hubs». Although there are already existing implementations of GTC concepts, there are still a lot of open questions concerning GTC governance and ownership models hindering easy marketing of the GTC approach. This paper discusses how and to which extent smart contracts in combination with blockchain technology as innovative solutions are able to facilitate GTC governance and how smart contracts can be applied to provide legal certainty by managing and allocating distributed access to common-pool resources. Smart contracts can be considered as computerised transaction protocols for the execution of underlying legal contracts, and they do not only target reducing transaction costs by realising trackable and irreversible transactions through blockchain technology for distributed databases, but also show high potential to strengthen cooperative business structures and to facilitate the entrepreneurial collaboration of cross-organisational business processes. From a legal perspective, it is controversial whether the use of smart contracts to distribute access to resources in terms of both general common-pool resources. GTCs implies an added value automatically for legal certainty and fair balance among different forms and degrees of access granted to different members of the cooperative. In cases of incorrect performance, change of circumstances or unduly induced contracts smart contracts fall considerably short on the protection of weaker parties, which the paper illustrates at the example of GTCs to be a decisive detriment of the cooperative members. The paper analyses these potentials and risks of smart contracts for the case of GTCs and showcases from both business and legal perspective in terms of their potential as viable means of distributing access to common-pool resources comprising infrastructure. Keywords common-pool resources, cooperative governance, blockchain, smart contracts, Green Transport Corridors.

A method towards Web service combination for cross-organisational business process using QoS and cluster

ABSTRACTHow to quickly combine various Web services to support cross-organisational business processes is the key technical problem in service computing. Because of the changeability of QoS of Web services, the traditional methods are unadaptable to the new environments. In this paper, a new service composition method, called Improved Self-organising neural network Method for Web Service Composition, is proposed to achieve QoS-aware Web service combination, according to using the clustering technology. First, fuzzy mathematics is used to express each QoS attribute and the improved self-organising neural network is used to cluster services to reduce the number of candidate services. Secondly, all the centre of each cluster is selected and formed a composite service by using an exhaustive algorithm. Thirdly, the service cluster that is represented by the concrete services. Finally, the optimal service combination can be selected using integer programming or genetic algorithm. The experimental result shows the efficiency of Web service composition and demonstrates the applicability.

Method towards discovering potential opportunity information during cross-organisational business processes using role identification analysis within complex social network

ABSTRACT The key to discover potential opportunity information in cross-organisation business processes (COBPs) is to identify the primary roles and actors, i.e. how to obtain their associations according to the interactive behaviours within the complex social networks. The information of roles in COBPs is commonly considered important and explicitly related with activities contained in COBPs. In this paper, we define a role as a configurable resource model integrating the capabilities and knowledge required to the qualified actors. Furthermore, we introduce two networks named as role-based interactive behaviour network and handover of work social network to investigate the information on roles. How to build the complex social network mapped on roles from COBPs is also discussed, and an approach to obtain the potential opportunity information is proposed by combining with the significance of roles and actors. The simulation result shows that the primary roles may not completely correspond to the central position in networks, but they are closely associated with more reliable actors.

Semantic Framework for Energy-Aware Resource Management of IoT in Business Processes

Recently, IoT adoption has increased in several domains. IoT devices are multi-modal and heterogeneous due to their varied properties, standards, and manufactures. This leads to interoperability issues, which can be solved using semantic technologies. Likewise, these devices participate in numerous cross-organizational business processes (BPs). Being resource-constrained, they must be managed in an energy-aware manner to avoid BP failures. However, due to lack of a common ontology and formalization of energy-related concepts impedes their optimal management in BPs. To bridge this gap, the authors capitalize on existing semantic models such as FIESTA-IoT and IoT-BPO. They propose the following: (i) formalization of IoT concepts in BPs related to energy, their properties and constraints, and (ii) resolving resource conflicts based on strategies. The feasibility of this framework is illustrated by evaluating the semantic model for its coverage of concepts from IoT-A reference model, along with proof of concept tools that allows ontology-based support for process modeling.

XML interoperability standards for seamless communication: An analysis of industry-neutral and domain-specific initiatives

Attaining seamless interoperability among heterogeneous communication systems and technologies remains a great challenge in todays’ networked world. Real time information exchange among heterogeneous and geographically distributed systems is required to support the execution of complex e-business scenarios supported by cross-organizational business processes. XML emerged as a foundation for performing e-business, receiving an increasing adoption in the new market economies. Several interoperability standards emerged, which provide specifications on performing business-to-business e-business, what information to share, when and how. The aim of this article is to present an up-to-date review of current XML-based industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives towards seamless communication, discussing their commonalities and differences, and highlighting directions for further research and development work. An overview of the main standards’ elements is also made, analyzing how different initiatives address them.As numerous standardization initiatives are quickly emerging and changing, it is not easy to understand them. By analyzing the most commonly referred XML-based standards for interoperability, this article has two main contributions. First, it provides an up-to-date review of the most relevant industry-neutral and domain-specific standardization initiatives aiming at achieving seamless interoperability among communication systems. Second, by comparing these initiatives, a set of recommendations is advanced towards improving further interoperability developments, offering a unique niche for researchers, practitioners and developers to make significant contributions.

Leveraging big-data for business process analytics

Purpose – This paper aims to present a solution that enables organizations to monitor and analyse the performance of their business processes by means of Big Data technology. Business process improvement can drastically influence in the profit of corporations and helps them to remain viable. However, the use of traditional Business Intelligence systems is not sufficient to meet today ' s business needs. They normally are business domain-specific and have not been sufficiently process-aware to support the needs of process improvement-type activities, especially on large and complex supply chains, where it entails integrating, monitoring and analysing a vast amount of dispersed event logs, with no structure, and produced on a variety of heterogeneous environments. This paper tackles this variability by devising different Big-Data-based approaches that aim to gain visibility into process performance. Design/methodology/approach – Authors present a cloud-based solution that leverages (BD) technology to provide essential insights into business process improvement. The proposed solution is aimed at measuring and improving overall business performance, especially in very large and complex cross-organisational business processes, where this type of visibility is hard to achieve across heterogeneous systems. Findings – Three different (BD) approaches have been undertaken based on Hadoop and HBase. We introduced first, a map-reduce approach that it is suitable for batch processing and presents a very high scalability. Secondly, we have described an alternative solution by integrating the proposed system with Impala. This approach has significant improvements in respect with map reduce as it is focused on performing real-time queries over HBase. Finally, the use of secondary indexes has been also proposed with the aim of enabling immediate access to event instances for correlation in detriment of high duplication storage and synchronization issues. This approach has produced remarkable results in two real functional environments presented in the paper. Originality/value – The value of the contribution relies on the comparison and integration of software packages towards an integrated solution that is aimed to be adopted by industry. Apart from that, in this paper, authors illustrate the deployment of the architecture in two different settings.

Enhancing BPMN 2.0 informational perspective to support interoperability for cross-organizational business processes

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is being adopted as one of the industry standards for modeling cross-organizational business processes (CBPs). BPMN analyzes a business process as a set of interrelated activities, focusing primarily on the functional perspective of the process. However, for successful CBP modeling, an informational perspective is important. Although BPMN 2.0 supports information flow design, existing representations of data/information elements are not sufficient to support CBP modeling requirements. In this light, the paper proposes an approach for formal modeling and specification of information requirements used and generated in the CBPs. A UML View Profile is introduced to specify information requirements as views over the common reference ontology. A BPMN 2.0 extension is introduced to connect the defined views and the corresponding process activities. Ultimately, the proposed information requirements specification enables generation of the message instance and its transformation at the implementation level.

A Social Platform for Knowledge Gathering and Exploitation, Towards the Deduction of Inter-enterprise Collaborations

Several standards have been defined for enhancing the efficiency of B2B web-supported collaboration. However, they suffer from the lack of a general semantic representation, which leaves aside the promise of deducing automatically the inter-enterprise business processes. To achieve the automatic deduction, this paper presents a social platform, which aims at acquiring knowledge from users and linking the acquired knowledge with the one maintained on the platform. Based on this linkage, this platform aims at deducing automatically cross-organizational business processes (i.e. selection of partners and sequencing of their activities) to fulfill any opportunity of collaboration.

A Modelling Method for Cross-Organizational Business Process Collaboration Based on Petri Net and Process Algebra

In order to resolve the modelling problem of business processes collaboration, especially, the asynchronous communication mechanism problem and the verification problem, combining the respective strengths of Petri Nets and the classical process algebra CCS, a modeling method is proposed in this paper. First of all, modelling the internal view of cross-organization based on Petri Nets, extracting the communication interface and mapping to internal transition to get the public view; Secondly, researching on the asynchronous communication mechanism and modelling the communication process by CCS to get communication behavior view, thus making the verification of collaboration converts to the CCS derivation; Finally, an algorithm is proposed to generate automatically the behaviors possessed by every transition in model view. The modelling method proposed is not only to analyze and verify the structure properties in collaboration, but also to analyze and verify the behavior properties, which brings a huge convenience for further analysis and verification in cross-organizational business process collaboration.

On Enabling Compliance of Cross-organizational Business Processes (Extended Abstract)

On Enabling Compliance of Cross-organizational Business Processes (Extended Abstract)

The Preliminary Discussion about Key Problems of Cross-Organizational Business Process Collaboration

With the rapid development of E-commerce on a global scale and the cooperation between enterprises has become increasingly frequent, it has a great impact on the overall efficiency and flexibility between the organizations that strengthen combined depth and solution the problem of the mutual connection between cross-organizational business processes. This article firstly expounds the formation and its important role of cross-organizational business process, and then proposed the model for cross-organizational business process collaboration. The model proposed is modeled from two aspects, namely, management model and business model. In the end, four key problems of cross-organizational business process collaboration are further discussed.

Research of BPMNO-Based Business Process Model in Logistics Warehousing Field

In order to solve the problem of concepts and terminology inconsistent of cross-organizational business process management, we have studied the methods of Domain Ontology construction and BPMNO elements, and constructed Meta ontology model of Logistic Warehousing business process. According to this, we further construct Logistics Warehousing domain ontology described by BPMN elements that makes it semantic.