Trusted Artifact-Driven Process Monitoring of Multi-party Business Processes with Blockchain

Abstract

Multi-party business processes are characterized by the lack of a central coordination, as each participant controls only a portion of the process. Nonetheless, organizations often need to know how the whole process is performed, especially when artifacts belonging to an organization are manipulated by the other participants. This requires a monitoring system able to collect and share in a trusted way data about the status of the activities performed by the different parties. To achieve this goal, in this paper we combine artifact-driven monitoring with blockchain. The former, introduced in previous work, can determine how the process is executed, while the latter enables a trusted data exchange among the participants of the business process to reduce the possibility for a fraudulent organization to alter monitoring data. The feasibility and the impacts on costs of the proposed platform is validated via a prototype based on the Ethereum blockchain implementing a real-world use case.