Process mining for artifact-centric blockchain applications

Process mining can provide valuable insights into user behavior, performance, and security for blockchain applications. In return, process mining benefits from the trustworthiness of blockchain data. One obstacle to realizing these benefits is that blockchain data is inadequate for process mining. This issue has been previously explored in literature, but mainly with regards to workflow-centric processes, leaving out the more common artifact-centric applications. This article introduces ACEL (Artifact-Centric Event Log), an extension to the OCEL (Object-Centric Event Log) standard, specifically designed for artifact-centric processes. Additionally, we present a method for extracting ACEL logs from the Ethereum blockchain platform and demonstrate its effectiveness and the perspectives of process discovery through two case studies of public Ethereum applications.