Inter-organizational Business Processes Managed by Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technology is highly expected to be a solution to the consistency and trust problems in managing business processes that span across organizational boundaries. However, to execute collaborative business processes, we need a mechanism for enabling entire workflows as a whole, where participants’ private processes must agree on the shared inter-organizational processes realized by Blockchain. To address this, we introduce a set of techniques that take business process models as input and transforms them into statecharts for Blockchain and process participants. We also optimize the size of the statechart in order to reduce the number of communications between Blockchain and participants. The statecharts are then used as a basis for generating software artifacts: smart contracts running on Blockchain and Web applications for process participants. Through the evaluation of our solution, we confirmed that our algorithms produce software artifacts that collaboratively work together. By applying the statechart reduction algorithms, we could reduce the number of sending and receiving events by 74% and 65% in two case studies.