Providing online operational support for distributed, security sensitive electronic business processes

Online process mining techniques are increasingly used to provide operational support. In this work we describe tools to support distributed business processes which handle sensitive data and require a high level of security together with real-time validation. The techniques presented here have been specifically developed for real-time compliance checking of distributed processes in choreographies of heterogeneous entities. Challenges include the fast aggregation, analysis and validation of process logs that are collected from the distributed participants. The autonomy of the participating entities has to be respected and no sensitive data pertaining to the content of the individual transactions must be accessed for process support and validation purposes. A validation authority for process monitoring and validation is set up. Together with software agents dispatched to the participating entities the validation authority collects events in a central log and then analyzes these events using a particular representation of the process in form of a validation tree to detect and resolve anomalies. We describe the application of these technologies in a distributed business process with more than 400,000 daily process executions. The business process is supported by a help desk managing and responding to incidents and anomalies. We observe a reduction of 90% of the calls to the help desk and an average reduction of 15% in call length. Further the help desk was enabled to act pro-actively, calling participants to the process even before they became aware of anomalies that affected their organization.