A Package Reduction Approach to Modeling and Analysis of Cross-Organization Emergency Response Processes with Privacy Protected

The emergency disposals are usually charged by several geographically dispersed and logically collaborated emergency organizations. In addition, each emergency organization owns its private emergency response process and can operate independently. In this case, modeling such cross-organizational emergency response processes is really a challenging issue when considering: 1) effective collaboration and coordination among different emergency partners; and 2) reasonable privacy and security protection mechanism to maintain the sensitive information confidential and unseen by other involved partners. In this paper, we propose a package reduction-based privacy protection approach to facilitate the modeling. Specifically, a kind of workflow nets extended with time, resource, and message factors, called TRMWFnets for short, is first introduced to model cross-organization emergency response processes. Then, a three-layered framework is proposed to model cross-organization emergency response processes by taking into account their privacy protection and temporal performance evaluation. Next, a set of reduction rules are proposed to reduce the scale of a TRMWFnet while keeping its external observable timing, message, and resource factors invariant. These reduction rules not only improve the efficiency of temporal performance evaluation but also protect the business privacy of each emergency organization during its collaboration and interaction with others. Finally, a real-life scenario of cross-organization fire emergency response processes is used to validate our proposed approaches.