Cargando…

Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes

In an Inter-Organizational Business Process (IOBP), independent organizations (collaborators) exchange messages to perform business transactions. With process mining, the collaborators could know what they are actually doing from process execution data and take actions for improving the underlying b...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Morales-Sandoval, Miguel, Molina, José A., Marin-Castro, Heidy M., Gonzalez-Compean, Jose Luis
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8507485/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34712800
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.731
_version_ 1784581866866606080
author Morales-Sandoval, Miguel
Molina, José A.
Marin-Castro, Heidy M.
Gonzalez-Compean, Jose Luis
author_facet Morales-Sandoval, Miguel
Molina, José A.
Marin-Castro, Heidy M.
Gonzalez-Compean, Jose Luis
author_sort Morales-Sandoval, Miguel
collection PubMed
description In an Inter-Organizational Business Process (IOBP), independent organizations (collaborators) exchange messages to perform business transactions. With process mining, the collaborators could know what they are actually doing from process execution data and take actions for improving the underlying business process. However, process mining assumes that the knowledge of the entire process is available, something that is difficult to achieve in IOBPs since process execution data generally is not shared among the collaborating entities due to regulations and confidentiality policies (exposure of customers’ data or business secrets). Additionally, there is an inherently lack-of-trust problem in IOBP as the collaborators are mutually untrusted and executed IOBP can be subject to dispute on counterfeiting actions. Recently, Blockchain has been suggested for IOBP execution management to mitigate the lack-of-trust problem. Independently, some works have suggested the use of Blockchain to support process mining tasks. In this paper, we study and address the problem of IOBP mining whose management and execution is supported by Blockchain. As contribution, we present an approach that takes advantage of Blockchain capabilities to tackle, at the same time, the lack-of-trust problem (management and execution) and confident execution data collection for process mining (discovery and conformance) of IOBPs. We present a method that (i) ensures the business rules for the correct execution and monitoring of the IOBP by collaborators, (ii) creates the event log, with data cleaning integrated, at the time the IOBP executes, and (iii) produces useful event log in XES and CSV format for the discovery and conformance checking tasks in process mining. By a set of experiments on real IOBPs, we validate our method and evaluate its impact in the resulting discovered models (fitness and precision metrics). Results revealed the effectiveness of our method to cope with both the lack-of-trust problem in IOBPs at the time that contributes to collect the data for process mining. Our method was implemented as a software tool available to the community as open-source code.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-8507485
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2021
publisher PeerJ Inc.
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-85074852021-10-27 Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes Morales-Sandoval, Miguel Molina, José A. Marin-Castro, Heidy M. Gonzalez-Compean, Jose Luis PeerJ Comput Sci Data Science In an Inter-Organizational Business Process (IOBP), independent organizations (collaborators) exchange messages to perform business transactions. With process mining, the collaborators could know what they are actually doing from process execution data and take actions for improving the underlying business process. However, process mining assumes that the knowledge of the entire process is available, something that is difficult to achieve in IOBPs since process execution data generally is not shared among the collaborating entities due to regulations and confidentiality policies (exposure of customers’ data or business secrets). Additionally, there is an inherently lack-of-trust problem in IOBP as the collaborators are mutually untrusted and executed IOBP can be subject to dispute on counterfeiting actions. Recently, Blockchain has been suggested for IOBP execution management to mitigate the lack-of-trust problem. Independently, some works have suggested the use of Blockchain to support process mining tasks. In this paper, we study and address the problem of IOBP mining whose management and execution is supported by Blockchain. As contribution, we present an approach that takes advantage of Blockchain capabilities to tackle, at the same time, the lack-of-trust problem (management and execution) and confident execution data collection for process mining (discovery and conformance) of IOBPs. We present a method that (i) ensures the business rules for the correct execution and monitoring of the IOBP by collaborators, (ii) creates the event log, with data cleaning integrated, at the time the IOBP executes, and (iii) produces useful event log in XES and CSV format for the discovery and conformance checking tasks in process mining. By a set of experiments on real IOBPs, we validate our method and evaluate its impact in the resulting discovered models (fitness and precision metrics). Results revealed the effectiveness of our method to cope with both the lack-of-trust problem in IOBPs at the time that contributes to collect the data for process mining. Our method was implemented as a software tool available to the community as open-source code. PeerJ Inc. 2021-09-29 /pmc/articles/PMC8507485/ /pubmed/34712800 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.731 Text en © 2021 Morales-Sandoval et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Computer Science) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Data Science
Morales-Sandoval, Miguel
Molina, José A.
Marin-Castro, Heidy M.
Gonzalez-Compean, Jose Luis
Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
title Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
title_full Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
title_fullStr Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
title_full_unstemmed Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
title_short Blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
title_sort blockchain support for execution, monitoring and discovery of inter-organizational business processes
topic Data Science
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8507485/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34712800
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.731
work_keys_str_mv AT moralessandovalmiguel blockchainsupportforexecutionmonitoringanddiscoveryofinterorganizationalbusinessprocesses
AT molinajosea blockchainsupportforexecutionmonitoringanddiscoveryofinterorganizationalbusinessprocesses
AT marincastroheidym blockchainsupportforexecutionmonitoringanddiscoveryofinterorganizationalbusinessprocesses
AT gonzalezcompeanjoseluis blockchainsupportforexecutionmonitoringanddiscoveryofinterorganizationalbusinessprocesses