Towards a Formal Specification and Automatic Execution of ETLs in Cross-organizational Business Processes

Small and medium-sized enterprises seize business opportunities jointly to be more concurrent on the market. They form virtual organizations with the goal of competing with larger companies for new business opportunities. Their collaboration in the domain of Industry 4.0 usually requires production process contracts to be created. To easily handle bureaucratic tasks of creating such contracts and ensure transparent and automatic activation of contract clauses, companies can utilize the CE-MultiProLan solution. The solution contains concepts required for the specification of cross-organizational business processes and utilizes the distributed ledger technology and smart contracts to ensure trust between collaborating parties through transparency and automation of contractual clause fulfilment. Each collaborating party can define which private data from their internal systems should be shared with other collaborating parties for contract conformance-checking and monitoring of production processes. To avoid potential fraudulent behavior, in which a company manually falsifies the shared data, CE-MultiProLan solution needs to be extended with new concepts and components to support automated data sharing. For such purposes, Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes could be used to automatically transform data from the shopfloor into the shared data. However, manual development of ETLs is often time-consuming and error prone. In this paper, we examine common ways to formally define the ETL processes, especially in Industry 4.0, and lay ground for future extension of CE-MultiProLan that would allow for faster and easier ETL specification.