Enforcing Correctness of Collaborative Business Processes Using Plans

Abstract

Generally, a collaborative business process is a distributed process, in which a set of parallel business processes are involved. These business processes have complementary competencies and knowledge, and cooperate with each other to achieve their common business goals. To ensure the correctness of collaborative business processes, we propose a novel plan-based correctness enforcement approach in this article, which is privacy-preserving, available and efficient. This approach first requires participating organizations to define their business processes. Then, each participating organization employs a set of reduction rules to build the public process of its business process, in which all internal private activities and the flows formed by them are removed. Next, a set of correct plans is generated from these public processes. A plan is essentially a process fragment without alternative routings. From the external perspective (i.e., ignoring all internal private activities and the flows formed by them), a parallel execution of the business processes corresponding to these public processes follows only one such plan. Lastly, each participating organization independently refactors its business process using these resulting correct plans. Using the message places (corresponding to the actual communication interfaces), these refactored processes are composed in parallel. Thus, a correct and loosely coupled enforced process is constructed. This approach is evaluated on actual collaborative business processes, and the experimental results show that compared with state-of-the-art enforcement proposals, it can achieve correctness enforcement while protecting the business privacy of organizations and is available. Meanwhile, it is also more efficient and scalable, even a collaborative business process with tens of millions of states can be enforced within a few seconds.