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State synchronization in process-oriented chaincode

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Abstract

Business processes often involve operational processes, contracts, and regulations. The modeling of such processes must address regulation monitoring and enforcement and maintain a reliable history of data for evidence. This study proposes modeling business processes as chaincode (CC) on permissioned blockchains (BCs). The challenges encountered by the proposed approach are state synchronizations among distributed nodes (called authnodes)and realtime requirements. This study separates CC executions from the state management of multiple BCs and demonstrates the validity of the proposed approach with a payment authorization system at a Chinese bank.

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Acknowledgements

The research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61872011) and Ministry of Education-China Mobile (MCM20170406). The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. Guan-Nan Li, Cheng-Jian Hu, Ya-fei Yao, Zhi-Jian Li participated in the experiments.

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Correspondence to Lian Yu.

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Lian Yu received the bachelor and master degrees from Tsinghua University, China in 1986 and 1989, respectively, and PhD degree in Information Science at Yokohama National University, Japan in 1999. She had worked as a researcher at Arizona State University, USA from 2000 to 2005. Dr. Yu is currently a full professor at the School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, China.

Wei-Tek Tsai received SB from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, master and PhD from University of California — Berkeley, USA and is a professor Emeritus from Arizona State University, USA. He is with Beihang University, China.

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Yu, L., Tsai, WT. State synchronization in process-oriented chaincode. Front. Comput. Sci. 13, 1166–1181 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-017-6484-z

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