Untrusted business process monitoring and execution using blockchain

Abstract

The integration of business processes across organizations is typically beneficial for all involved parties. However, the lack of trust is often a roadblock. Blockchain is an emerging technology for decentralized and transactional data sharing across a network of untrusted participants. It can be used to find agreement about the shared state of collaborating parties without trusting a central authority or any particular participant. Some blockchain networks also provide a computational infrastructure to run autonomous programs called smart contracts. In this paper, we address the fundamental problem of trust in collaborative process execution using blockchain. We develop a technique to integrate blockchain into the choreography of processes in such a way that no central authority is needed, but trust maintained. Our solution comprises the combination of an intricate set of components, which allow monitoring or coordination of business processes. We implemented our solution and demonstrate its feasibility by applying it to three use case processes. Our evaluation includes the creation of more than 500 smart contracts and the execution over 8,000 blockchain transactions.