1,721,017 research outputs found
Integrating the Internet of Things with Business Process Management: A Process-aware Framework for Smart Objects
No full textDue to the achievements in the Internet of Things (IoT) field, Smart Objects are often involved in business processes. However, the integration of IoT with Business Process Management (BPM) is far from mature: problems related to process compliance and Smart Objects configuration with respect to the process requirements have not been fully addressed yet; also, the interaction of Smart Objects with multiple business processes that belong to different stakeholders is still under investigation.
My PhD thesis aims to fill this gap by extending the BPM lifecycle, with particular focus on the design and analysis phase, in order to explicitly support IoT and its requirements
Combining artifact-driven monitoring with blockchain: Analysis and solutions
No full textThe adoption of blockchain to enable a trusted monitoring of multi-party business processes is recently gaining a lot of attention, as the absence of a central authority increases the efficiency and the effectiveness of the delivery of monitoring data. At the same time, artifact-driven monitoring has been proposed to create a flexible monitoring platform for multi-party business processes involving an exchange of goods (e.g., in the logistics domain), where the information delivery does not require a central authority but it lacks of sufficient level of trust. The goal of this paper is to analyze the dependencies among these two areas of interests, and to propose two possible monitoring platforms that exploit blockchain to achieve a trusted artifact-driven monitoring solution
Artifact-Driven Monitoring for Human-Centric Business Processes with Smart Devices: Assessment and Improvement
No full textMonitoring human-centric business processes requires human operators to manually notify to a BPMS when activities start or end. Even if nowadays smart devices, like smartphones and tablets, are adopted to make the transmission of these notifications easier, such devices usually hold a passive role, being a simple mediator between the BPMS and human operators.
In this paper, we adopt the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm by envisioning an artifact-driven process monitoring where all the objects interacting with a business process instance can be coupled with a smart device to actively detect when process activities start or end. To support the artifact-driven monitoring, we propose an ontology-based approach to assess and improve the monitorability of a process model
Trusted Compliance Checking on Blockchain with Commitments:A Model-Driven Approach
No full textBlockchain and smart contracts are promising technologies to perform trusted compliance checking. By formalizing compliance rules with smart contract code and collecting information required to assess them on-chain, anyone can verify if a compliance violation occurred. To this aim, tools and techniques to execute business processes on-chain have been proposed. However, such techniques require the activities and the process data internal to an organization to be fully disclosed with all the participants. This may not be desirable for confidentiality reasons, and may also lead to high operational costs.This paper proposes a model-driven approach that uses a choreography diagram annotated with commitments to model compliance rules and to identify the message exchanges that are relevant for enforcing business agreements. The resulting diagram is used to generate the smart contract code required to perform compliance checking, limiting the information stored in the blockchain to the one strictly needed to evaluate the compliance rules
DeepThought: a Reputation and Voting-based Blockchain Oracle
No full textThanks to built-in immutability and persistence, the blockchain is often seen as a promising technology to certify information. However, when the information does not originate from the blockchain itself, its correctness cannot be taken for granted. To address this limitation, blockchain oracles -- services that validate external information before storing it in a blockchain -- were introduced. In particular, when the validation cannot be automated, oracles rely on humans that collaboratively cross-check external information. In this paper, we present DeepThought, a distributed human-based oracle that combines voting and reputation schemes. An empirical evaluation compares DeepThought with a state-of-the-art solution and shows that our approach achieves greater resistance to voters corruptions in different configurations
On Handling Business Process Anomalies through Artifact-based Modeling
Full text linkControl flow-based process modeling notations, like BPMN, are good at dening the normal execution flow and the management of foreseen exceptions. When unforeseen situations occur, one cannot detect if the execution is still acceptable with respect to the process definition.
In contrast, artifact-centric process modeling notations, like the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM), are better suited for this kind of scenarios: they define a process in terms of acceptable states and do not enforce any
specific execution flow. This improves flexibility, but hampers the clarity of the defined models. The goal of this paper is to show how an extension of GSM, i.e., E-GSM, can be used to detect deviations from the execution
path as modeled in BPMN, while keeping the process execution alive
Designing secure business processes for blockchains with SecBPMN2BC
Full text linkCollaborative business processes can be seen as smart contracts, as they are oftentimes adopted to express agreements among different organizations. Indeed, they provide mechanisms to formalize the obligations of each involved party. For instance, collaborative business processes can specify when a certain task should be executed, under which conditions a service should be offered to the other participants, and how physical objects and information should be manipulated. In this setting, to prevent misuse of smart contracts and services and information provided, it is paramount to guarantee by design that security requirements are fulfilled. With the rise in popularity of blockchains, several approaches exploiting the trusted smart contract execution environment offered by this technology to enforce collaborative business processes have been proposed. Yet, the complexity of business processes, security requirements, and blockchain applications calls for an engineering approach that guides the design of secure business processes. Such an approach should both take advantage of the possibilities offered by blockchain technology to enforce some security requirements (e.g., non-repudiation), and take into account the limitations blockchain poses for other security requirements (e.g., confidentiality). However, we are not aware of any existing work that aims at addressing such issues following a similar approach.
In this article, we propose SecBPMN2BC: a model-driven approach to designing business processes with security requirements that are meant to be deployed on blockchains. SecBPMN2BC consists of: (i) an extension of BPMN 2.0 that allows designing secure smart contracts; (ii) a set of algorithms and their implementation that check incompatible security requirements and help the design of smart contracts; (iii) a workflow that guides the application of the method. The method has been validated with a survey conducted on security and BPMN experts
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