Privacy Preserving Business Process Fusion

Virtual enterprises (VEs) are temporary and loosely coupled alliances of businesses that join their skills to catch new business opportunities. However, the dependencies among the activities of a prospective VE cross the boundaries of the VE constituents. It is therefore crucial to allow the VE constituents to discover their local views of the interorganizational workflow, enabling each company to re-shape, optimize and analyze the possible local flows that are consistent with the processes of the other VE constituents. We refer to this problem as VE process fusion. Even if it has been widely investigated, no previous work addresses VE process fusion in the presence of privacy constraints. In this paper we demonstrate how private intersection of regular languages can be used as the main building block to implement the privacy preserving fusion of business processes modeled by means of bounded Petri nets.