Privacy preserving collaborative business process management

Abstract

The basic objective of collaborative supply chain planning (CSCP) is to fulfill the demand of the customers by integrating a network of organizations through mediums such as internet. But, the supply chain (SC) partners are often reluctant to share their strategic information. The exchange of relevant strategic information yet maintaining privacy is a challenging issue for CSCP. It is therefore required to develop privacy preserving coordination mechanisms (PPCM) that can align the business objectives of SC partners. This paper presents a distributed algorithm for PPCM for CSCP based on secure multi-party computation. This requires negotiations for compensation between the buying and the selling firms. We have considered a single buyer and single supplier (SBSS) case along with the process flow logic using a process flow construct for secure computation. We have extended the method to a multiparty negotiation process for a multiple buyer and single supplier (MBSS) case. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.