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Decentralized collaborative business process execution using blockchain

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Abstract

Blockchain technology enables several untrustworthy parties to execute inter-organizational business processes in a tamper-proof manner. Existing approaches are based on smart contract code generation. Although the smart contract immutability guarantees that the process model is followed by each participant, any change in the process model makes the existing process instance smart contract not compliant with the process model and therefore, the deployment of a new smart contract becomes a requirement. In this paper, we propose CoBuP, a decentralized Collaborative Business Process execution architecture using blockchain. To address the inflexibility issue, this paper presents an interpreter of BPMN process models, supporting the instantiating, execution, monitoring of process instances. For this reason, one generic smart contract is deployed once, which helps generate a process instance, create BPMN elements by invoking the process instance predefined functions, and dynamically update the adaptation of a process at run time. For validation purposes, two use cases have permitted to carry out different experiments that demonstrate the technical feasibility of our approach. The obtained results of the experimental evaluation shows that our approach cost is similar or lower than that of the existing approaches.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/Floukil/BlockchainBasedBP

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, LAMIH, CNRS, UMR 8201, F-59313, Valenciennes, France

    Faiza Loukil & Mourad Abed

  2. MIRACL laboratory, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

    Khouloud Boukadi

  3. INSA Hauts-de-France, F-59313, Valenciennes, France

    Mourad Abed

  4. University of Lyon, Iaelyon school of Management, University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, CNRS, LIRIS, Lyon, France

    Chirine Ghedira-Guegan

Authors
  1. Faiza Loukil
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  2. Khouloud Boukadi
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  4. Chirine Ghedira-Guegan
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Correspondence to Faiza Loukil.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Emerging Blockchain Applications and Technology

Guest Editors: Rui Zhang, C. Mohan, and Ermyas Abebe

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Loukil, F., Boukadi, K., Abed, M. et al. Decentralized collaborative business process execution using blockchain. World Wide Web 24, 1645–1663 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-021-00901-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-021-00901-7

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