A resilient inter-organizational workflow assignment plan selection approach: Application to a digital health use case

Abstract

Workflow Management Systems are rapidly evolving and increasingly used in a variety of industries, allowing organizations to automate and enhance their business processes. Hence, they are open to collaboration throw inter-organizational workflows to achieve common objectives. Thus, organizations could thereby adapt to highly dynamic environments and abrupt sudden changes like during epidemics. One of the particular interests for security researchers is to ensure workflow resiliency, which means ensuring the completion of the workflow execution given a defined set of security constraints without violating the security policy. However, the rigid application of security constraints restricts some task-organization assignments, which leads to the workflow satisfiability problem. Moreover, a wise selection of collaborating organizations is very important for secure resilient inter-organizational workflow execution. Therefore, we aim in this paper to propose a resilient inter-organizational workflow assignment plan selection approach to select a valid task-organization plan that allows a resilient inter-organizational workflow complete execution. Our proposed approach, uses the task priority concept, Bayesian inference, and a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making approach based on the methods Analytical Hierarchical Process and Grey Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution. As a result, the proposed approach selects the best assignment plan for a resilient execution of the Inter-Organizational Workflow, in addition to delegates for each task-organization assignment if available.