Incorporating Transaction Lifecycle Information in Blockchain Process Discovery

Blockchain process discovery aims to exploit event log emitted by smart contracts to understand the underlying business processes that are enacted within it. Current existing methods perform event log extraction by decoding the event signature of blockchain smart contract in which intra-activities were considered. However, as blockchain transactions are subject to an inclusion time, the challenge in understanding the temporal constraint presented within blockchain architectural design remains open as existing techniques do not incorporate such information. In this paper, a framework to acquire a business process model from historical event data of digital assets stored in the Ethereum blockchain is proposed. Departs from the existing methods, this framework takes into account the inclusion time when a transaction is being submitted to the blockchain. Upon the incorporation of inclusion time into an event log, sequential analysis towards the stay time of a process instance arrived at a particular state, could be carried accordingly. The framework is demonstrated against CryptoKitties ERC-721 token event log, the most popular digital asset in Ethereum known to date. Furthermore, the way on how the framework relates to a blockchain-IoT scenario is described.