Executable Models and Instance Tracking for Decentralized Applications on Blockchains and Cloud Platforms -- Metamodel and Implementation

Decentralized applications rely on non-centralized technical infrastructures and coordination principles. Without trusted third parties, their execution is not controlled by entities exercising centralized coordination but is instead realized through technologies supporting distribution such as blockchains and serverless computing. Executing decentralized applications with these technologies, however, is challenging due to the limited transparency and insight in the execution, especially when involving centralized cloud platforms. This paper extends an approach for execution and instance tracking on blockchains and cloud platforms permitting distributed parties to observe the instances and states of executable models. The approach is extended with (1.) a metamodel describing the concepts for instance tracking on cloud platforms independent of concrete models or implementation, (2.) a multidimensional data model realizing the concepts accordingly, permitting the verifiable storage, tracking, and analysis of execution states for distributed parties, and (3.) an implementation on the Ethereum blockchain and Amazon Web Services (AWS) using state machine models. Towards supporting decentralized applications with high scalability and distribution requirements, the approach establishes a consistent view on instances for distributed parties to track and analyze the execution along multiple dimensions such as specific clients and execution engines.Comment: This is an unpublished preprint; both versions archived on arXiv.org have not been published. Although initially intended for publication, the preprint has undergone further improvements and has been utilized as input for new publications. (see also: https://www.unifr.ch/inf/digits/en/group/team/haerer.html

Big data analytics tools for improving the decision-making process in agrifood supply chain

Introduzione: Nell'interesse di garantire una sicurezza alimentare a lungo termine di fronte a circostanze mutevoli, è necessario comprendere e considerare gli aspetti ambientali, sociali ed economici del processo di produzione. Inoltre, a causa della globalizzazione, sono stati sollevati i problemi delle lunghe filiere agroalimentari, l'asimmetria informativa, la contraffazione, la difficoltà di tracciare e rintracciare l'origine dei prodotti e le numerose questioni correlate quali il benessere dei consumatori e i costi sanitari. Le tecnologie emergenti guidano verso il raggiungimento di nuovi approcci socioeconomici in quanto consentono al governo e ai singoli produttori agricoli di raccogliere ed analizzare una quantità sempre crescente di dati ambientali, agronomici, logistici e danno la possibilità ai consumatori ed alle autorità di controllo della qualità di accedere a tutte le informazioni necessarie in breve tempo e facilmente. Obiettivo: L'oggetto della ricerca riguarda lo studio delle modalità di miglioramento del processo produttivo attraverso la riduzione dell'asimmetria informativa, rendendola disponibile alle parti interessate in un tempo ragionevole, analizzando i dati sui processi produttivi, considerando l'impatto ambientale della produzione in termini di ecologia, economia, sicurezza alimentare e qualità di cibo, costruendo delle opportunità per le parti interessate nel prendere decisioni informate, oltre che semplificare il controllo della qualità, della contraffazione e delle frodi. Pertanto, l'obiettivo di questo lavoro è quello di studiare le attuali catene di approvvigionamento, identificare le loro debolezze e necessità, analizzare le tecnologie emergenti, le loro caratteristiche e gli impatti sulle catene di approvvigionamento e fornire utili raccomandazioni all'industria, ai governi e ai policy maker.Introduction: In the interest of ensuring long-term food security and safety in the face of changing circumstances, it is interesting and necessary to understand and to take into consideration the environmental, social and economic aspects of food and beverage production in relation to the consumers’ demand. Besides, due to the globalization, the problems of long supply chains, information asymmetry, counterfeiting, difficulty for tracing and tracking back the origin of the products and numerous related issues have been raised such as consumers’ well-being and healthcare costs. Emerging technologies drive to achieve new socio-economic approaches as they enable government and individual agricultural producers to collect and analyze an ever-increasing amount of environmental, agronomic, logistic data, and they give the possibility to the consumers and quality control authorities to get access to all necessary information in a short notice and easily. Aim: The object of the research essentially concerns the study of the ways for improving the production process through reducing the information asymmetry, making it available for interested parties in a reasonable time, analyzing the data about production processes considering the environmental impact of production in terms of ecology, economy, food safety and food quality and build the opportunity for stakeholders to make informed decisions, as well as simplifying the control of the quality, counterfeiting and fraud. Therefore, the aim of this work is to study current supply chains, to identify their weaknesses and necessities, to investigate the emerging technologies, their characteristics and the impacts on supply chains, and to provide with the useful recommendations the industry, governments and policymakers

A Model-driven Approach for the Description of Blockchain Business Networks

The concept of blockchain technology has gained significant momentum in practice and research in the past few years, as it provides an effective way for addressing the issues of anonymity and traceability in distributed scenarios with multiple parties, which have to exchange information and want to securely collaborate with each other. However, up-to-date, the impact of the structure and setup of business networks on successfully applying blockchain technology, remains largely unexplored. We propose a model-driven approach, combining an ontology and a layer model, that is capable of capturing the properties of existing blockchain-driven business networks. The layers are used to facilitate the comprehensive description of such networks. We also introduce the Blockchain Business Network Ontology (BBO), formalizing the concepts and properties for describing the integral parts of a blockchain network. We show the practical applicability of our work by evaluating and applying it to an available blockchain use case

Towards a process-oriented analysis of blockchain data

Blockchains sequentially store the history of transactional information, in a virtually immutable and distributed way. Moreover, second-generation blockchains such as Ethereum are programmable environments, and every operation invocation towards the smart contracts corresponds to a transaction sequentially collated in the ledgers. They thus allow for the controlled enactment of multi-party processes as well as the immutable recording of their distributed execution. Despite the verification, tracking, and monitoring of such blockchain-enabled processes appears paramount, a formal and implemented framework encompassing those aspects is still a mostly unexplored research avenue. The talk revolves around the current state of the art, as well as the opportunities and challenges that arise when it comes to conducting a process-oriented analysis on data stemming from blockchains, from a representation and modelling perspective

Visualizing Provenance In A Supply chain Using Ethereum Blockchain

Visualization is a widely used in different fields of studies such as supply chain management when there is a need to communicate information to general users. However, there are multiple limitations and problems with visualizing information within traditional systems. In traditional systems, data is in control of one single authority; so data is mutable and there is no guarantee that system administer does not change the data to achieve a desired result. Besides, such systems are not transparent and users do not have any access to the data flow. In this thesis, the main goal was to visualize information that has been saved on top of a new technology named blockchain to overcome the aforementioned problems. All the records in the system are saved on the blockchain and data is pulled out from blockchain to be used in visualization. To have a better insight, a review has been done on relevant studies about blockchain, supply chain and visualization. After identifying the gap in literature review, an architecture was proposed that was used in the implementation. The implementation contains, a system on top of ethereum blockchain and front-end which allows users to interact with the system. In the system, all the information about products and all the transactions that ever happened in the system, are recorded on the blockchain. Then, data was retrieved from the blockchain and used to visualize provenance of products on Google Map API. After implementing the system, the performance was evaluated to make sure that it can handle different situations where various number of clients sending request to the system simultaneously. The performance was as expected in which system responds longer when number of clients sending requests were growing. The proposed solution fill the gap that was identified in the literature review. By adding provenance visualization users can explore previous owners and locations of a product in a trustable manner. Future research can focus on analysis of data which will allow organizations to make informed decisions on choosing popular products to sell

Blockchain Technology in Business and Information Systems Research

Peer reviewe

A System Dynamic Model for Application of Blockchain in the United States Electricity Sector

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Business and Technology at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Science by Oluwafemi Ezekiel Oyeniran on April 14, 2020

Blockchain and Smart Contracts: The Need for Better Education

The study aims at understanding the current scenario of blockchain education and whether it is meeting the increasing demand of blockchain professionals in the job market. In addition, it also provided a comparison between Ethereum and Hyperledger and analyzed the one best suited for better academic curriculum design. By drawing from various sources of data, including journals, articles, reports, the study provided critical insights into the various aspects of a blockchain education. It assesses the existing curriculum on the blockchain that includes courses and programs from various renowned universities and business schools. The study reveals that although the courses are comprehensive in developing theoretical knowledge of the learner, it does not provide the scope for practical skill development. This gap reflects the skill-shortage of blockchain professionals in the job market. To address this, the research also provides some guidelines for developing a comprehensive pedagogical structure using Hyperledger technology. The discussion also highlights the benefits associated with Hyperledger and the way it can foster active learning among the learners. Finally, the researcher also provided the practical and theoretical implications of the study and assessed its limitations directing on the future course of research