Update on techniques for business process matching
Laur Kanger

Nowadays, enterprises engage in loosely coupled collaborations. A non-trivial task is to ensure interoperability of these collaborations: can the interactions between the partners lead to a deadlock? Are the involved parties guaranteed to terminate properly?

So far, this task were addressed by top-down approaches that require an agreement among the parties to disclose public interfaces of their internal processes. In UaESMC, we developed methods that go beyond these results.

We implemented a bottom-up mechanism to match business processes and to suggest suitable corrections. Our technique enables two enterprises to check soundness of their collaboration without revealing neither their own process or a public interface. If their composition is unsound, we also return to the first enterprise a new business process that can be composed soundly with the partner. Among the potentially huge number of such processes, we guarantee to select the one that is as close as possible to the original business process of the enterprise.

To achieve confidentiality, we implemented the mechanism using SHAREMIND platform for secure multiparty computation. As a result, only the correction process is leaked to the first enterprise and no more.