Mining Blockchain Processes: Extracting Process Mining Data from Blockchain Applications

EasyChair Preprint 1356

Abstract

Blockchain technology has been gaining popularity as a platform for developing decentralized applications and executing cross-organisational processes. However, extracting data that allows analysing the process view from blockchains is surprisingly hard. Therefore, blockchain data are rarely used for process mining. In this paper, we propose a framework for alleviating that pain. The framework comprises three main parts: a manifest specifying how data is logged, an extractor for retrieving data (structured according to the XES standard), and a generator that produces logging code to support smart contract developers. Among others, we propose a convenient way to encode logging data in a compact form, to achieve relatively low cost and high throughput for on-chain logging. The proposal is evaluated with logs created from generated logging code, as well as with existing blockchain applications that do not make use of the proposed code generator.

Keyphrases: Blockchain, Process Mining, XES, logging, smart contracts

@booklet{EasyChair:1356,
  author    = {Christopher Klinkmüller and Alexander Ponomarev and An Binh Tran and Ingo Weber and Wil van der Aalst},
  title     = {Mining Blockchain Processes: Extracting Process Mining Data from Blockchain Applications},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1356},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}