Formal approach for generating privacy preserving user requirements-based business process fragments

A business process fragment is a portion of a business process, more commonly designed for reuse purposes. Fragments are intended to be declared as safe from a privacy perspective, when manipulated in an open context. Privacy is related to the authority to have a view on some sensitive information. A business process privacy-preserving fragmentation is the task of decomposing business processes into significant fragments, which can be reused in the future in order to build new business processes while preserving the sensitive information from leakage. This paper presents a design-time two-phases approach to decomposing existing business processes into significant fragments while preserving the integrity of data items that navigate within the process. The first phase is based on the so-called Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) technique handling semantic activity clustering according to designers requirements, while dealing with the privacy constraints. The second phase manipulates clusters of activities and generates ready-for-reuse fragments. Some experiments that demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach are also provided.