An architecture for multi-chain business process choreographies

Abstract

An increasing number of organizations employ blockchain technology in their business process landscapes, especially when dealing with inter-organizational choreographies. Due to complex requirements with regard to data security and privacy in practice, however, no singular blockchain captures all use cases. Blockchains optimized for various levels of risk tolerance and confidentiality coexist in multi-chain environments, posing severe architectural challenges for blockchain-based Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). Current state-of-the-art approaches lack the global perspective necessary, and focus on single-blockchain environments. In this paper, we alleviate these issues by developing a general architecture for multi-chain BPMSs for choreographies. We show the feasibility of our architecture by a prototypical implementation, and discuss future challenges using a concrete case study.