Koostööäriprotsesside läbiviimine plokiahelal: süsteem

Tänapäeval peavad organisatsioonid tegema omavahel koostööd, et kasutada ära üksteise täiendavaid võimekusi ning seeläbi pakkuda oma klientidele parimaid tooteid ja teenuseid. Selleks peavad organisatsioonid juhtima äriprotsesse, mis ületavad nende organisatsioonilisi piire. Selliseid protsesse nimetatakse koostööäriprotsessideks. Üks peamisi takistusi koostööäriprotsesside elluviimisel on osapooltevahelise usalduse puudumine. Plokiahel loob detsentraliseeritud pearaamatu, mida ei saa võltsida ning mis toetab nutikate lepingute täitmist. Nii on võimalik teha koostööd ebausaldusväärsete osapoolte vahel ilma kesksele asutusele tuginemata. Paraku on aga äriprotsesside läbiviimine selliseid madala taseme plokiahela elemente kasutades tülikas, veaohtlik ja erioskusi nõudev. Seevastu juba väljakujunenud äriprotsesside juhtimissüsteemid (Business Process Management System – BPMS) pakuvad käepäraseid abstraheeringuid protsessidele orienteeritud rakenduste kiireks arendamiseks. Käesolev doktoritöö käsitleb koostööäriprotsesside automatiseeritud läbiviimist plokiahela tehnoloogiat kasutades, kombineerides traditsioonliste BPMS- ide arendusvõimalused plokiahelast tuleneva suurendatud usaldusega. Samuti käsitleb antud doktoritöö küsimust, kuidas pakkuda tuge olukordades, milles uued osapooled võivad jooksvalt protsessiga liituda, mistõttu on vajalik tagada paindlikkus äriprotsessi marsruutimisloogika muutmise osas. Doktoritöö uurib tarkvaraarhitektuurilisi lähenemisviise ja modelleerimise kontseptsioone, pakkudes välja disainipõhimõtteid ja nõudeid, mida rakendatakse uudsel plokiahela baasil loodud äriprotsessi juhtimissüsteemil CATERPILLAR. CATERPILLAR-i süsteem toetab kahte lähenemist plokiahelal põhinevate protsesside rakendamiseks, läbiviimiseks ja seireks: kompileeritud ja tõlgendatatud. Samuti toetab see kahte kontrollitud paindlikkuse mehhanismi, mille abil saavad protsessis osalejad ühiselt otsustada, kuidas protsessi selle täitmise ajal uuendada ning anda ja eemaldada osaliste juurdepääsuõigusi.Nowadays, organizations are pressed to collaborate in order to take advantage of their complementary capabilities and to provide best-of-breed products and services to their customers. To do so, organizations need to manage business processes that span beyond their organizational boundaries. Such processes are called collaborative business processes. One of the main roadblocks to implementing collaborative business processes is the lack of trust between the participants. Blockchain provides a decentralized ledger that cannot be tamper with, that supports the execution of programs called smart contracts. These features allow executing collaborative processes between untrusted parties and without relying on a central authority. However, implementing collaborative business processes in blockchain can be cumbersome, error-prone and requires specialized skills. In contrast, established Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) provide convenient abstractions for rapid development of process-oriented applications. This thesis addresses the problem of automating the execution of collaborative business processes on top of blockchain technology in a way that takes advantage of the trust-enhancing capabilities of this technology while offering the development convenience of traditional BPMSs. The thesis also addresses the question of how to support scenarios in which new parties may be onboarded at runtime, and in which parties need to have the flexibility to change the default routing logic of the business process. We explore architectural approaches and modelling concepts, formulating design principles and requirements that are implemented in a novel blockchain-based BPMS named CATERPILLAR. The CATERPILLAR system supports two methods to implement, execute and monitor blockchain-based processes: compiled and interpreted. It also supports two mechanisms for controlled flexibility; i.e., participants can collectively decide on updating the process during its execution as well as granting and revoking access to parties.https://www.ester.ee/record=b536494

Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain (BC), as an emerging technology, is revolutionizing Business Process Management (BPM) in multiple ways. The main adoption is to serve as a trusted infrastructure to guarantee the trust of collaborations among multiple partners in trustless environments. Especially, BC enables trust of information by using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). With the power of smart contracts, BC enforces the obligations of counterparties that transact in a business process (BP) by programming the contracts as transactions. This paper aims to study the state-of-the-art of BC technologies by (1) exploring its applications in BPM with the focus on how BC provides the trust of BPs in their lifecycles; (2) identifying the relations of BPM as the need and BC as the solution with the assessment towards BPM characteristics; (3) discussing the up-to-date progresses of critical BC in BPM; (4) identifying the challenges and research directions for future advancement in the domain. The main conclusions of our comprehensive review are (1) the study of adopting BC in BPM has attracted a great deal of attention that has been evidenced by a rapidly growing number of relevant articles. (2) The paradigms of BPM over Internet of Things (IoT) have been shifted from persistent to transient, from static to dynamic, and from centralized to decentralized, and new enabling technologies are highly demanded to fulfill some emerging functional requirements (FRs) at the stages of design, configuration, diagnosis, and evaluation of BPs in their lifecycles. (3) BC has been intensively studied and proven as a promising solution to assure the trustiness for both of business processes and their executions in decentralized BPM. (4) Most of the reported BC applications are at their primary stages, future research efforts are needed to meet the technical challenges involved in interoperation, determination of trusted entities, confirmation of time-sensitive execution, and support of irreversibility

Cross-Collaboration Processes based on Blockchain and IoT: a survey

Cross-collaboration processes are decentralized by nature and their centralized monitoring can trigger mistrust. Nevertheless, a decentralized monitoring facility such as a blockchain-based and Internet-of-Things-aware (IoT-aware) business process management system can reduce this pitfall. However, concerns related to usability, privacy, and performance, hamper the wide adoption of these systems. To better understand the challenges at stake, this paper reviews the use of blockchain and IoT devices in cross-collaboration processes. This survey sheds some light on standard uses such as model engineering or permissioned blockchains which help adopt cross-collaboration business process management systems. Moreover, with respect to process design, two schools of thought coexist, addressing both constrained and loosely processes. Furthermore, a focus on data-centric processes appears to get some momentum, as many industries go digital. Finally, this survey underlines the need to orient future research towards a more flexible, scalable, and data-aware blockchain-based business process management system

Blockchain for Business Process Enactment: A Taxonomy and Systematic Literature Review

Blockchain has been proposed to facilitate the enactment of interorganisational business processes. For such processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of rules and the integrity of execution traces - without the need for a centralised trusted party. However, the enactment of interorganisational processes pose manifold challenges. In this work, we ask what answers the research field offers in response to those challenges. To do so, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). As our guiding question, we investigate the guarantees and capabilities of blockchain-based enactment approaches. Based on resulting empirical evidence, we develop a taxonomy for blockchain-based enactment. We find that a wide range of approaches support traceability and correctness; however, research focusing on flexibility and scalability remains nascent. For all challenges, we point towards future research opportunities.Comment: Preprint, Accepted at BPM 2022, Blockchain Foru

Designing secure business processes for blockchains with SecBPMN2BC

Collaborative business processes can be seen as smart contracts, as they are oftentimes adopted to express agreements among different organizations. Indeed, they provide mechanisms to formalize the obligations of each involved party. For instance, collaborative business processes can specify when a certain task should be executed, under which conditions a service should be offered to the other participants, and how physical objects and information should be manipulated. In this setting, to prevent misuse of smart contracts and services and information provided, it is paramount to guarantee by design that security requirements are fulfilled. With the rise in popularity of blockchains, several approaches exploiting the trusted smart contract execution environment offered by this technology to enforce collaborative business processes have been proposed. Yet, the complexity of business processes, security requirements, and blockchain applications calls for an engineering approach that guides the design of secure business processes. Such an approach should both take advantage of the possibilities offered by blockchain technology to enforce some security requirements (e.g., non-repudiation), and take into account the limitations blockchain poses for other security requirements (e.g., confidentiality). However, we are not aware of any existing work that aims at addressing such issues following a similar approach. In this article, we propose SecBPMN2BC: a model-driven approach to designing business processes with security requirements that are meant to be deployed on blockchains. SecBPMN2BC consists of: (i) an extension of BPMN 2.0 that allows designing secure smart contracts; (ii) a set of algorithms and their implementation that check incompatible security requirements and help the design of smart contracts; (iii) a workflow that guides the application of the method. The method has been validated with a survey conducted on security and BPMN experts

Fine-grained Data Access Control for Collaborative Process Execution on Blockchain

Multi-party business processes are based on the cooperation of different actors in a distributed setting. Blockchains can provide support for the automation of such processes, even in conditions of partial trust among the participants. On-chain data are stored in all replicas of the ledger and therefore accessible to all nodes that are in the network. Although this fosters traceability, integrity, and persistence, it undermines the adoption of public blockchains for process automation since it conflicts with typical confidentiality requirements in enterprise settings. In this paper, we propose a novel approach and software architecture that allow for fine-grained access control over process data on the level of parts of messages. In our approach, encrypted data are stored in a distributed space linked to the blockchain system backing the process execution; data owners specify access policies to control which users can read which parts of the information. To achieve the desired properties, we utilise Attribute-Based Encryption for the storage of data, and smart contracts for access control, integrity, and linking to process data. We implemented the approach in a proof-of-concept and conduct a case study in supply-chain management. From the experiments, we find our architecture to be robust while still keeping execution costs reasonably low

Evolving Epistemic Infrastructure: The Role of Scientific Journals in the Age of Generative AI

Scientific journals, crucial components of our epistemic infrastructure, have continuously adapted to the changing technological landscape. Today, we stand at the precipice of a transformative phase brought about by generative AI, specifically large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Bard. In this opinion piece, I examine the implications of these models for the future of scientific journals and various stakeholders in the scientific community, including journals, scholars, and universities. To envisage the future trajectory of scientific journals, it’s imperative to comprehend the operational mechanisms of these models and the fundamentally recombinatorial nature of human knowledge creation. I suggest that one of the significant roles generative AI can play is facilitating “long jumps” in our knowledge exploration process. I further propose decentralization and deferred and temporary binding as two crucial characteristics of the evolving epistemic infrastructure that supports precarious knowledge production. I foresee a future where scientific journals extend beyond their traditional gatekeeping roles. I call for scholars—as authors, reviewers, and mentors—to utilize these technologies to traverse the broad landscape of potential knowledge, fostering a more inclusive and dynamic scientific ecosystem

Modelling Business Processes on a Blockchain Eco-System (BPMN)

Plokiahela tehnoloogiat on järjest enam vaadeldud kui paljutõotavat tehnoloogiat äriprotsesside muutmiseks. Selle potentsiaal on äratanud paljude ettevõtete tähelepanu uurimaks, kuidas plokiahel saab ettevõtetele kasuks olla. Sellist kasu saab siiski saavutada ainult äriprotsesse uuendades, mitte lihtsalt olemasolevat tehnoloogiat asendades. Protsessimudelid mängivad olulist rolli äriprotsesside uuendamisel, kuna nad analüüsivad neid protsesse ja vajadusel kujundavad ümber. Selles lõputöös uuritakse, kuidas plokiahelale orienteeritud protsesse saab modelleerida BPMN tegevuskeskse modelleerimise paradigma abil. Selle saavutamiseks viiakse läbi uurimistöö mittetulundusühingute auditeerimisprotsesside ümberkujundamise kohta. Äriprotsesse modelleeritakse praeguses vormis ja kujundatakse BPMN abil ümber. Lõputöös uuritakse BPMN sobivust, võttes arvesse harjumuspäraselt esinevaid plokiahela spetsiifilisi mustreid. Lõputöö näitab, et plokiahelale orienteeritud protsesse saab BPMN-iga piisavalt modelleerida. Siiski, BPMN-il puuduvad teatud elemendid, mis võiksid täpsemini kajastada korduma kippuvaid mustreid.Blockchain technology is more and more positioned as a promising technology for changing business processes. This potential has attracted companies to investigate how blockchain can be enable significant benefit gains for companies. However, such gains can only be realized by innovating business processes and not by merely replacing existing technology. Process models play an important role when engaged in innovating business processes because of process analysis and process redesign. This thesis investigates how blockchain-oriented processes can be modelled with the activity-centric modeling paradigm of BPMN. To achieve this, a case study on redesigning the auditing process of a non-profit organization is conducted. The business process is modelled as-is and redesigned by using BPMN. The thesis examines the suitability of BPMN by considering commonly occurring blockchain specific patterns. The thesis shows that blockchain-oriented processes can sufficiently be modeled with BPMN. However, BPMN lack certain elements that could represent commonly occurring patterns more accurately