Inter-organizational collaborative BPMN 2.0 business process discovery

Abstract

Inter-organizational collaborative business processes involve interactions between participants from different organizations to achieve a common objective collaboratively. From a modeling perspective, there are two complementary views of interest: the choreography, which focuses on the message exchanged between participants, and the collaboration, which also describes the orchestration of each participant’s activities. Traditional process discovery techniques do not consider participants or interactions between them since they usually focus on processes within a single participant. The discovery of inter-organizational collaborative business processes poses many challenges due to data scattered across participants with diverse infrastructures and technologies. This paper presents an approach for discovering inter-organizational collaborative business processes and tool support named Collaborative Miner. Based on an extended XES event log containing participants and message information, it uses existing discovery algorithms to uncover BPMN 2.0 collaboration process models and choreographies. The approach is evaluated using collaborative business process data from selected related work, with results discussed and compared across different scenarios.