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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Smart contracts are implemented in Solidity. However, they can be easily ported to other languages.
- 2.
Source code at https://bitbucket.org/polimiisgroup/ethereumclient.
- 3.
- 4.
The (anonymized) dataset is available at http://purl.org/polimi/martifact/logisticsds-anon (password: GM-CDC-JM-dataset).
- 5.
- 6.
The conversion rate was checked on March 15, 2019.
- 7.
- 8.
We assumed a transaction to be initiated every time an event is produced.
References
Baresi, L., Di Ciccio, C., Mendling, J., Meroni, G., Plebani, P.: mArtifact: an artifact-driven process monitoring platform. In: Clarisó, R., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the BPM Demo Track and BPM Dissertation Award co-located with 15th International Conference on Business Process Modeling (BPM 2017), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Barcelona, Spain, 13 September 2017, vol. 1920. CEUR-WS.org (2017). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1920/BPM_2017_paper_188.pdf
Baresi, L., Meroni, G., Plebani, P.: Using the guard-stage-milestone notation for monitoring BPMN-based processes. In: Schmidt, R., Guédria, W., Bider, I., Guerreiro, S. (eds.) BPMDS/EMMSAD -2016. LNBIP, vol. 248, pp. 18–33. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39429-9_2
Benet, J.: IPFS-content addressed, versioned, P2P file system. arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.3561 (2014)
Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Fundamentals of Business Process Management, 2nd edn. Springer, Heidelberg (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33143-5
García-Bañuelos, L., Ponomarev, A., Dumas, M., Weber, I.: Optimized execution of business processes on blockchain. In: Carmona, J., Engels, G., Kumar, A. (eds.) BPM 2017. LNCS, vol. 10445, pp. 130–146. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65000-5_8
Hsieh, C., Lin, B.: Impact of standardization on EDI in B2B development. Ind. Manag. Data Syst. 104(1), 68–77 (2004)
Hull, R., Batra, V.S., Chen, Y.-M., Deutsch, A., Heath III, F.F.T., Vianu, V.: Towards a shared ledger business collaboration language based on data-aware processes. In: Sheng, Q.Z., Stroulia, E., Tata, S., Bhiri, S. (eds.) ICSOC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9936, pp. 18–36. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46295-0_2
Mendling, J., et al.: Blockchains for business process management - challenges and opportunities. ACM Trans. Manag. Inf. Syst. 9(1), 41–416 (2018)
Meroni, G., Baresi, L., Montali, M., Plebani, P.: Multi-party business process compliance monitoring through IoT-enabled artifacts. Inf. Syst. 73, 61–78 (2018)
Meroni, G., Di Ciccio, C., Mendling, J.: An artifact-driven approach to monitor business processes through real-world objects. In: Maximilien, M., Vallecillo, A., Wang, J., Oriol, M. (eds.) ICSOC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10601, pp. 297–313. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69035-3_21
Meroni, G., Plebani, P.: Combining artifact-driven monitoring with blockchain: analysis and solutions. In: Matulevičius, R., Dijkman, R. (eds.) CAiSE 2018. LNBIP, vol. 316, pp. 103–114. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92898-2_8
Prybila, C., Schulte, S., Hochreiner, C., Weber, I.: Runtime verification for business processes utilizing the bitcoin blockchain. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. (2017). ISSN 0167-739X. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.08.024, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X1731837X
Swan, M.: Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy. O’Reilly Media Inc., Newton (2015)
Tai, S.: Continuous, trustless, and fair: changing priorities in services computing. In: Lazovik, A., Schulte, S. (eds.) ESOCC 2016. CCIS, vol. 707, pp. 205–210. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72125-5_16
Tian, F., Taudes, A., Mendling, J.: A supply chain traceability system for food safety based on HACCP, blockchain & Internet of Things. In: ICSSSM 2017, pp. 1–6. IEEE (2017)
Weber, I., Xu, X., Riveret, R., Governatori, G., Ponomarev, A., Mendling, J.: Untrusted business process monitoring and execution using blockchain. In: La Rosa, M., Loos, P., Pastor, O. (eds.) BPM 2016. LNCS, vol. 9850, pp. 329–347. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_19
Wood, G.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Proj. Yellow Pap. 151, 1–32 (2014)
Wu, H., Li, Z., King, B., Ben Miled, Z., Wassick, J., Tazelaar, J.: A distributed ledger for supply chain physical distribution visibility. Information 8(4), 137 (2017)
Acknowledgments
This work has been funded by the Italian Project ITS Italy 2020 under the Technological National Clusters program, and by the DITAS project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement RIA 731945.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Meroni, G., Plebani, P., Vona, F. (2019). Trusted Artifact-Driven Process Monitoring of Multi-party Business Processes with Blockchain. In: Di Ciccio, C., et al. Business Process Management: Blockchain and Central and Eastern Europe Forum. BPM 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 361. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30429-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30429-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30428-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30429-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)