A survey on business process view integration: past, present and future applications to blockchain

Abstract

PurposeThe complexity of business environments often causes organizations to produce several inconsistent views of the same business process (BP), leading to fragmentation. BP view integration attempts to produce an integrated view from different views of the same model, facilitating the management of BP models.Design/methodology/approachTo study the trends of BP view integration, the authors conduct an extensive and systematic literature review to summarize findings since the 1970s. With a starting corpus of 918 documents, this survey draws up a systematic inventory of solutions used in academia and industry. By narrowing it down to 71 articles, the authors discuss in-depth 17 BP integration techniques papers, classifying each solution according to 9 criteria.FindingsThe authors' study shows that most view-integration methods (11) utilize annotation-based matching, based on formal merging rules. While most solutions are formalized, only approximately half are validated with a real-world use case scenario. View integration can be applied to areas other than database schema integration and BP view integration.Practical implicationsBy summarizing existing knowledge up to June 2021, the authors explore possible future research directions. The authors highlight the application of view integration to the blockchain research area, where stakeholders can have different views on the same blockchain. The authors expect that this study contributes to interdisciplinary research across view integration, namely to the context of blockchain.Originality/valueThis survey serves to pave the way for future trends, where the authors highlight the application of view integration to blockchain research.

Can We Share the Same Perspective? Blockchain Interoperability with Views

“…Our approach follows a Global and Local as View because views are created from a subset of the global state, but then can be merged and processed. We call the reader's attention to the survey on view integration techniques, mostly used in the database and business process management research areas [2]. Next, we present how views can be used to enable blockchain interoperability.…”

“…After different view generators create partial views, a merge operation may be applied to the views to produce a consolidated view, according to a merging algorithm. Since BUNGEE can integrate views, it is considered a view integration system [14,2,15]. We focus our contributions on two research questions (RQ):…”

Is My Perspective Better Than Yours? Blockchain Interoperability with Views

“…The second use case is decentralized application migration. Migration of blockchain-based applications is not only necessary, but increasingly common [4,13,8]. Migration allows enterprises to experiment with different DLT infrastructures without the risk of vendor lock-in.…”

“…After different view generators create partial views, a merge operation may be applied to the views to produce a consolidated view, according to a merging algorithm. Since BUNGEE can integrate views, it is considered a view integration system [37,8,34]. We focus our contributions around two research questions: process integration (BPVI) addresses the challenges of processes involving several participants with different incentives, alleviating them by merging models that represent a different view of the same model.…”

Is My Perspective Better Than Yours? Blockchain Interoperability with Views

“…The second use case is decentralized application migration. Migration of blockchain-based applications is not only necessary, but increasingly common [30,24,2]. Migration allows enterprises to experiment with other DLT infrastructures without the risk of vendor lock-in.…”