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Interpreted and Confidential Execution of Process Choreographies on a Blockchain

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Business Process Management: Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, Central and Eastern European, Educators and Industry Forum (BPM 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 527))

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Abstract

In our work, we refine the application of blockchain technology for managing inter-organizational business processes without a centralized authority, addressing the issue of data privacy inherent in public blockchains. Building on the proposal of Toldi and Kocsis, which involves recording encrypted instance data and reference hashes in smart contracts and aligning with business process models through zero-knowledge succinct arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs), we are able to improve several key metrics. Our approach introduces an efficient blockchain-based system tailored for business process modeling notation (BPMN) process choreographies. Unlike many other approaches in the field of blockchain-based process enactment, our system eliminates the need to deploy process-specific smart contracts. This alteration reduces the cost of instantiating new medium-sized process models by at least 88% compared to Toldi and Kocsis. Additionally, we achieve a greater than 99% reduction in the time required to generate conformance proofs. These enhancements result in a more cost-effective and streamlined approach for the private execution of choreographies on a blockchain.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/fstiehle/chorpiler.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/OskarPetto/zk-choreographies.

  3. 3.

    https://hardhat.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been partially supported and funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) for the research projects “DiCYCLE – Reconsidering digital deconstruction, reuse and recycle processes using BIM and Blockchain” and “USEFLEDS - Unleashing Sector-coupling Flexibility by means of an Energy Data Space” under the contract number 886960 and 905128, respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Wien, Karlsplatz 13, 1040, Wien, Austria

    Oskar Petto

  2. Institute of Computer Engineering, TU Wien, Karlsplatz 13, 1040, Wien, Austria

    Thomas Preindl & Martin Kjäer

Authors
  1. Oskar Petto
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  2. Thomas Preindl
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  3. Martin Kjäer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Oskar Petto .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Claudio Di Ciccio

  2. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Walid Fdhila

  3. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Simone Agostinelli

  4. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Daniel Amyot

  5. Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany

    Henrik Leopold

  6. Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Michal Krčál

  7. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Monika Malinova Mandelburger

  8. University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia

    Gregor Polančič

  9. University of Zagreb, Varaždin, Croatia

    Katarina Tomičić-Pupek

  10. AGH University of Krakow, Kraków, Poland

    Katarzyna Gdowska

  11. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Thomas Grisold

  12. University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland

    Piotr Sliż

  13. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Iris Beerepoot

  14. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Renata Gabryelczyk

  15. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Ralf Plattfaut

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Petto, O., Preindl, T., Kjäer, M. (2024). Interpreted and Confidential Execution of Process Choreographies on a Blockchain. In: Di Ciccio, C., et al. Business Process Management: Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, Central and Eastern European, Educators and Industry Forum. BPM 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 527. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70445-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70445-1_3

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