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Incentive Alignment of Business Processes

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Business Process Management (BPM 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12168))

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Abstract

Many definitions of business processes refer to business goals, value creation, profits, etc. Nevertheless, the focus of formal methods research on business processes lies on the correctness of the execution semantics of models w.r.t. properties like deadlock freedom, liveness, or completion guarantees. However, the question of whether participants are interested in working towards completion – or in participating in the process at all – has not been addressed as of yet.

In this work, we investigate whether inter-organizational business processes give participants incentives for achieving the business goals: in short, whether incentives are aligned within the process. In particular, fair behavior should pay off and efficient completion of tasks should be rewarded. We propose a game-theoretic approach that relies on algorithms for solving stochastic games from the machine learning community. We describe a method for checking incentive alignment of process models with utility annotations for tasks, which can be used for a priori analysis of inter-organizational business processes. Last but not least, we show that the soundness property is a special case of incentive alignment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.ikiguide.com/ethereum/, accessed 8-3-2020.

  2. 2.

    We shall use utility functions in the sense of von Neumann and Morgenstern  [19].

  3. 3.

    Nash equilibria are a special case, which however have drawbacks that motivate Aumann’s work on the more general correlated equilibria [3, 10].

  4. 4.

    We leave the very interesting situation of interleaved execution of several process instances for future work.

  5. 5.

    In the present paper, we only consider games of perfect information, which is suitable for business processes in a single organization or which are monitored on a blockchain.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their detailed comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Software and Business Engineering, Technische Universitaet Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Heindel & Ingo Weber

Authors
  1. Tobias Heindel
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  2. Ingo Weber
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tobias Heindel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Dirk Fahland

  2. FBK-irst, Trento, Italy

    Chiara Ghidini

  3. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Jörg Becker

  4. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Marlon Dumas

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Heindel, T., Weber, I. (2020). Incentive Alignment of Business Processes. In: Fahland, D., Ghidini, C., Becker, J., Dumas, M. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12168. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58666-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58666-9_6

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