TY - JOUR
T1 - Privacy-Preserving Behavioral Correctness Verification of Cross-Organizational Workflow with Task Synchronization Patterns
AU - Liu, Cong
AU - Zeng, Qingtian
AU - Cheng, Long
AU - Duan, Hua
AU - Zhou, Mengchu
AU - Cheng, Jiujun
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received January 9, 2020; revised March 25, 2020; accepted May 4, 2020. Date of publication June 4, 2020; date of current version July 2, 2021. This article was recommended for publication by Associate Editor E. Roszkowska and Editor S. A. Reveliotis upon evaluation of the reviewers’ comments. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61902222 and Grant 61872271, in part by the Science and Technology Development Fund of Shandong Province under Grant ZR2017MF027, in part by the Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province under Grant ts20190936 and Grant tsqn201909109, and in part by the Shandong University of Science and Technology Research Fund under Grant 2015TDJH102. (Corresponding authors: Qingtian Zeng; Long Cheng.) Cong Liu is with the School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo 255000, China (e-mail: liucongchina@sdust.edu.cn).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2004-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2021/7
Y1 - 2021/7
N2 - Workflow management technology has become a key means to improve enterprise productivity. More and more workflow systems are crossing organizational boundaries and may involve multiple interacting organizations. This article focuses on a type of loosely coupled workflow architecture with collaborative tasks, i.e., each business partner owns its private business process and is able to operate independently, and all involved organizations need to be synchronized at a certain point to complete certain public tasks. Because of each organization's privacy consideration, they are unwilling to share the business details with others. In this way, traditional correctness verification approaches via reachability analysis are not practical as a global business process model is unavailable for privacy preservation. To ensure its globally correct execution, this work establishes a correctness verification approach for the cross-organizational workflow with task synchronization patterns. Its core idea is to use local correctness of each suborganizational workflow process to guarantee its global correctness. We prove that the proposed approach can be used to investigate the behavioral property preservation when synthesizing suborganizational workflows via collaborative tasks. A medical diagnosis running case is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approaches. Note to Practitioners - Cross-organizational workflow verification techniques play an increasingly important role in ensuring the correct execution of collaborative enterprise businesses. This work addresses the issue of correctness verification for loosely coupled interactive workflows with collaborative tasks. To ensure the globally correct execution, a behavioral correctness verification approach is established. All proposed concepts and techniques are supported by open-source tools, and evaluation over a medical diagnosis process case has shown their applicability. The proposed methodology is readily applicable to industrial-size workflow correctness verification problems.
AB - Workflow management technology has become a key means to improve enterprise productivity. More and more workflow systems are crossing organizational boundaries and may involve multiple interacting organizations. This article focuses on a type of loosely coupled workflow architecture with collaborative tasks, i.e., each business partner owns its private business process and is able to operate independently, and all involved organizations need to be synchronized at a certain point to complete certain public tasks. Because of each organization's privacy consideration, they are unwilling to share the business details with others. In this way, traditional correctness verification approaches via reachability analysis are not practical as a global business process model is unavailable for privacy preservation. To ensure its globally correct execution, this work establishes a correctness verification approach for the cross-organizational workflow with task synchronization patterns. Its core idea is to use local correctness of each suborganizational workflow process to guarantee its global correctness. We prove that the proposed approach can be used to investigate the behavioral property preservation when synthesizing suborganizational workflows via collaborative tasks. A medical diagnosis running case is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approaches. Note to Practitioners - Cross-organizational workflow verification techniques play an increasingly important role in ensuring the correct execution of collaborative enterprise businesses. This work addresses the issue of correctness verification for loosely coupled interactive workflows with collaborative tasks. To ensure the globally correct execution, a behavioral correctness verification approach is established. All proposed concepts and techniques are supported by open-source tools, and evaluation over a medical diagnosis process case has shown their applicability. The proposed methodology is readily applicable to industrial-size workflow correctness verification problems.
KW - Behavioral correctness verification
KW - Petri nets
KW - business privacy preservation
KW - cross-organizational workflow
KW - discrete event systems
KW - task synchronization pattern
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U2 - 10.1109/TASE.2020.2993376
DO - 10.1109/TASE.2020.2993376
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85112728772
SN - 1545-5955
VL - 18
SP - 1037
EP - 1048
JO - IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
IS - 3
M1 - 9108605
ER -