BPMS Blockchain Technology Soft Integration For Non-tamperable Logging

Abstract

In contemporary business process management (BPM), the need for secure and transparent interactions between organizations is paramount. Integrating business process management systems (BPMS) with blockchain technology can offer protection against malicious actors and increase trust, e.g., in process mining results, by allowing organizations to share execution traces and associated information. However, hard integration approaches, which we define as execution of processes on the blockchain as smart contracts, have not found widespread application. A hard integration approach, e.g., by utilizing a BPMN to solidity compiler as Caterpillar, has a high barrier of entry since it requires a company to restructure its infrastructure and processes, especially pertaining to potential immutability of smart contracts, and the integration of outside information through oracles. In this work, we instead want to explore a soft integration approach, which allows companies to continue using their existing BPMS infrastructure and integrate blockchain technologies without having to change the overall architecture of the system. The goal is to produce distributed non-tamperable logs, created through the use of private blockchains, serving as basis for compliance checking and, thus, secure and trustworthy execution. In this work, we present two soft integration approaches, which are discussed, implemented, and evaluated regarding their integration complexity and performance. The results suggest that a soft integration approach of blockchain technology can enhance the reliability and traceability of existing BPM systems with low integration effort, thus pointing towards a path for high acceptance within organizations.