Secure Multi-Party Computation for Inter-Organizational Process Mining
This addresses the challenge of analyzing cross-organizational business processes while preserving data privacy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing secure computation platforms.
The paper tackles the problem of inter-organizational process mining where parties cannot share event logs, by proposing a secure multi-party computation approach to construct Directly-Follows Graphs without data sharing, achieving scalability through vectorization and parallel processing as validated in experiments on real-life logs.
Process mining is a family of techniques for analysing business processes based on event logs extracted from information systems. Mainstream process mining tools are designed for intra-organizational settings, insofar as they assume that an event log is available for processing as a whole. The use of such tools for inter-organizational process analysis is hampered by the fact that such processes involve independent parties who are unwilling to, or sometimes legally prevented from, sharing detailed event logs with each other. In this setting, this paper proposes an approach for constructing and querying a common type of artifact used for process mining, namely the frequency and time-annotated Directly-Follows Graph (DFG), over multiple event logs belonging to different parties, in such a way that the parties do not share the event logs with each other. The proposal leverages an existing platform for secure multi-party computation, namely Sharemind. Since a direct implementation of DFG construction in Sharemind suffers from scalability issues, the paper proposes to rely on vectorization of event logs and to employ a divide-and-conquer scheme for parallel processing of sub-logs. The paper reports on an experimental evaluation that tests the scalability of the approach on real-life logs.