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

ASXC2 approach: a service-X cost optimization strategy based on edge orchestration for IIoT.

Most computation-intensive industry applications and servers encounter service-reliability challenges due to the limited resource capability of the edge. Achieving quality data fusion and accurate service reliability with optimized service-x execution cost is challenging. While existing systems have taken into account factors such as device service execution, residual resource ratio, and channel condition; the service execution time, cost, and utility ratios of requested services from devices and servers also have a significant impact on service execution cost. To enhance service quality and reliability, we design a 2-step adaptive service-X cost consolidation (ASXC 2) approach. This approach is based on the node-centric Lyapunov method and distributed Markov mechanism, aiming to optimize the service execution error rate during offloading. The node-centric Lyapunov method incorporates cost and utility functions and node-centric features to estimate the service cost before offloading. Additionally, the Markov mechanism-inspired service latency prediction model design assists in mitigating the ratio of offload-service execution errors by establishing a mobility-correlation matrix between devices and servers. In addition, the non-linear programming multi-tenancy heuristic method design help to predict the service preferences for improving the resource utilisation ratio. The simulations show the effectiveness of our approach. The model performance is enhanced with 0.13% service offloading efficiency, 0.82% rate of service completion when transmitting data size is 400 kb, and 0.058% average service offloading efficiency with 40 CPU Megacycles when the vehicle moves 60 Km/h speed around the server communication range. Our model simulations indicate that our approach is highly effective and suitable for lightweight, complex environments

Efficient LiDAR-trajectory affinity model for autonomous vehicle orchestration.

Computation and memory resource management strategies are the backbone of continuous object tracking in intelligent vehicle orchestration. Multi-object tracking generates enormous measurements of targets and extended object positions using light detection and ranging (Lidar) sensors. Designing an adequate object-tracking system is a global challenge because of dynamic object detection and data association uncertainties during scene understanding. In this regard, we develop an intelligent multi-objective tracking (IMOT) system with a novel measurement model, called the box data association inflate (BDAI) model, to assess each target's object state and trajectory without noise by using the Bayesian approach. The box object filter method filters ambiguous detection responses during data association. The theoretical proof of the box object filter is derived based on binomial expansion. Prognosticating a lower-dimension object than the original point object reduces the computational complexity of vehicle orchestration. Two datasets (NuScenes dataset and our lab dataset) are considered during the simulations, and our approach measures the kinematic states adequately with reduced computation complexity compared to state-of-the-art methods. The simulation outcomes show that our proposed method is effective and works well to detect and track objects. The NuScenes dataset contains 28130 samples for training, 6019 examples for validation and 6008 samples for testing. IMOT achieves 58.09% tracking accuracy and 71% mAP with 5 ms pre-processing time. The Jetson Xavier NX consumes 49.63% GPU and 9.37% average power and exhibits 25.32 ms latency compared to other approaches. Our system trains a single pair frame in 169.71 ms with affinity estimation time of 12.19 ms, track association time of 0.19 ms and mATE of 0.245 compared to state-of-the-art approaches

A DRL-based service offloading approach using DAG for edge computational orchestration.

Edge infrastructure and Industry 4.0 required services are offered by edge-servers (ESs) with different computation capabilities to run social application's workload based on a leased-price method. The usage of Social Internet of Things (SIoT) applications increases day-to-day, which makes social platforms very popular and simultaneously requires an effective computation system to achieve high service reliability. In this regard, offloading high required computational social service requests (SRs) in a time slot based on directed acyclic graph (DAG) is an NP-complete problem. Most state-of-art methods concentrate on the energy preservation of networks but neglect the resource sharing cost and dynamic subservice execution time (SET) during the computation and resource sharing. This article proposes a two-step deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based service offloading (DSO) approach to diminish edge server costs through a DRL influenced resource and SET analysis (RSA) model. In the first level, the service and edge server cost is considered during service offloading. In the second level, the R-retaliation method evaluates resource factors to optimize resource sharing and SET fluctuations. The simulation results show that the proposed DSO approach achieves low execution costs by streamlining dynamic service completion and transmission time, server cost, and deadline violation rate attributes. Compared to the state-of-art approaches, our proposed method has achieved high resource usage with low energy consumption

A framework of trust in service workflows

The everything as a service concept enables dynamic resource provisions to be seen and delivered as services. Their proliferation nowadays leads to the creation of new value-added services composed of several sub-services in a pre-specified manner, known as service workflows. The use of service workflow appears in various domains, ranging from the basic interactions found in several e-commerce and several online interactions to the complex ones such as Virtual Organizations, Grids, and Cloud Computing. However, the dynamic nature in open environments makes a workflow constantly changing, to be adaptable to the change of new circumstances. How to determine suitable services has becomes a very important challenge. Requirements from both workflow owners and service providers play a significant role in the process of service acquisition, composition, and interoperations. From the workflow owner viewpoint, requirements can specify properties of services to be acquired for tasks in a workflow. On the other hand, requirements from service providers affect trust-based decision in workflow participation. The lack of formal languages to specify these requirements poses difficulties in the success of service collaborations in a workflow. It impedes: (1) workflow scalability that tends to be limited within a certain set of trusted domains; (2) dynamicity when each service acts in an autonomous and unpredictable manner where any change might affect existing requirements; and (3) inconsistency in dealing with the disparate representations of requirements, causing high overhead for compliance checking. This thesis focuses on developing a framework to overcome, or at least alleviate, these problems. It situates in inter-disciplinary areas including logics, workflow modelling, specification languages, trust management, decision support system, and compliance checking. Two core elements are proposed: (1) a formal logic-based requirement specification language, namely Trust Specification (TS), such that the requirements can be formally and uniformly expressed; and (2) compliance checking algorithms to automatically check for the compliance of requirements in service workflows. It is worth noting that this thesis contains some proofs of logic extension, workflow modelling, specification language, and compliance checking algorithms. These might raise a concern to people focusing deep on one particular area such as logics, or workflow modelling who might overlook the essence of the work, for example (1) the application of a formal specification language to the exclusive characteristics of service workflows, and (2) bridging the gap of the high level languages such as trust management down to the lower logic-based ones. The first contribution of the framework is to allow requirements to be independently and consistently expressed by each party where the workflow participation decision and acquisition are subject to the compliance of requirements. To increase scalability in large-scale interoperations, the second contribution centres on automatic compliance checking where TS language and compliance checking algorithms are two key components. The last contribution focuses on dynamicity. The framework allows each party to modify existing requirements and the compliance checking would be automatically activated to check for further compliance. As a result, it is anticipated that the solution will encourage the proliferation of service provisions and consumption over the Internet.</p

A framework of trust in service workflows

The everything as a service concept enables dynamic resource provisions to be seen and delivered as services. Their proliferation nowadays leads to the creation of new value-added services composed of several sub-services in a pre-specified manner, known as service workflows. The use of service workflow appears in various domains, ranging from the basic interactions found in several e-commerce and several online interactions to the complex ones such as Virtual Organizations, Grids, and Cloud Computing. However, the dynamic nature in open environments makes a workflow constantly changing, to be adaptable to the change of new circumstances. How to determine suitable services has becomes a very important challenge. Requirements from both workflow owners and service providers play a significant role in the process of service acquisition, composition, and interoperations. From the workflow owner viewpoint, requirements can specify properties of services to be acquired for tasks in a workflow. On the other hand, requirements from service providers affect trust-based decision in workflow participation. The lack of formal languages to specify these requirements poses difficulties in the success of service collaborations in a workflow. It impedes: (1) workflow scalability that tends to be limited within a certain set of trusted domains; (2) dynamicity when each service acts in an autonomous and unpredictable manner where any change might affect existing requirements; and (3) inconsistency in dealing with the disparate representations of requirements, causing high overhead for compliance checking. This thesis focuses on developing a framework to overcome, or at least alleviate, these problems. It situates in inter-disciplinary areas including logics, workflow modelling, specification languages, trust management, decision support system, and compliance checking. Two core elements are proposed: (1) a formal logic-based requirement specification language, namely Trust Specification (TS), such that the requirements can be formally and uniformly expressed; and (2) compliance checking algorithms to automatically check for the compliance of requirements in service workflows. It is worth noting that this thesis contains some proofs of logic extension, workflow modelling, specification language, and compliance checking algorithms. These might raise a concern to people focusing deep on one particular area such as logics, or workflow modelling who might overlook the essence of the work, for example (1) the application of a formal specification language to the exclusive characteristics of service workflows, and (2) bridging the gap of the high level languages such as trust management down to the lower logic-based ones. The first contribution of the framework is to allow requirements to be independently and consistently expressed by each party where the workflow participation decision and acquisition are subject to the compliance of requirements. To increase scalability in large-scale interoperations, the second contribution centres on automatic compliance checking where TS language and compliance checking algorithms are two key components. The last contribution focuses on dynamicity. The framework allows each party to modify existing requirements and the compliance checking would be automatically activated to check for further compliance. As a result, it is anticipated that the solution will encourage the proliferation of service provisions and consumption over the Internet.This thesis is not currently available in ORA