Abstract
Business processes have been long researched, with many tools, languages, and diagrammatic notations having been developed for automation. Recently, distributed ledger technology (of which Blockchain is one type) has been proposed for use in the monitoring of business process compliance. Such a set-up is attractive since it allows for immutability and thus a perfect record of the history of the business process regulated.
As blockchain platforms mature and their applications increase, one can observe that instead of having one blockchain as a ‘one world computer’ multiple blockchains will co-exist while possibly interacting. Existing work for business processes within the blockchain domain have focused on single isolated blockchain implementations. In this paper, we do away with this severely limiting assumption and propose a method to monitor business processes spanning different blockchains and other off-chain servers. We apply this work to business processes expressed in BPMN along with annotations proposed for a blockchain context. We further describe how we handle blockchain interoperability by synthesizing automatically off-chain monitors, acting as notaries, that handle message passing between blockchain systems, and how we employ hash-locking for cryptographically secure token swapping.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The terms are used in different ways in literature. We will use the two terms loosely here.
- 2.
Find a prototype here: https://github.com/shaunazzopardi/bpmn-to-solidity.
- 3.
When taking a conservative (at the time of writing) average, as of November 2020, gas cost of 16 Gwei per gas unit.
References
Alves, P.H., et al.: Exploring blockchain technology to improve multi-party relationship in business process management systems. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 2: ICEIS, pp. 817–825. INSTICC, SciTePress (2020). https://doi.org/10.5220/0009565108170825
Azzopardi, S., Colombo, C., Pace, G.: A technique for automata-based verification with residual reasoning. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, 25–27 February 2020, MODELSWARD 2020, Valletta, Malta (2020)
Azzopardi, S., Ellul, J., Pace, G.J.: Monitoring smart contracts: contractlarva and open challenges beyond. In: Colombo, C., Leucker, M. (eds.) RV 2018. LNCS, vol. 11237, pp. 113–137. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03769-7_8
Azzopardi, S., Pace, G.J., Schapachnik, F.: Contract automata with reparations. In: Hoekstra, R. (ed.) Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2014: The Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, 10–12 December 2014. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 271, pp. 49–54. IOS Press (2014). https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-468-8-49
Azzopardi, S., Pace, G.J., Schapachnik, F.: On observing contracts: deontic contracts meet smart contracts. In: Palmirani, M. (ed.) Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2018: The Thirty-first Annual Conference, Groningen, The Netherlands, 12–14 December 2018. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 313, pp. 21–30. IOS Press (2018). https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-935-5-21
Buterin, V.: Chain interoperability. In: R3 Reports. R3 (September 2016)
Colombo, C., Ellul, J., Pace, G.J.: Contracts over smart contracts: recovering from violations dynamically. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds.) ISoLA 2018. LNCS, vol. 11247, pp. 300–315. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_23
Colombo, C., Pace, G.J.: Comprehensive monitor-oriented compensation programming. In: Buhnova, B., Happe, L., Kofron, J. (eds.) Proceedings 11th International Workshop on Formal Engineering approaches to Software Components and Architectures, FESCA 2014, Grenoble, France, 12th April 2014. EPTCS, vol. 147, pp. 47–61 (2014). https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.147.4
Corradini, F., Marcelletti, A., Morichetta, A., Polini, A., Re, B., Tiezzi, F.: Engineering trustable choreography-based systems using blockchain. In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 1470–1479. SAC 2020, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3341105.3373988
Di Ciccio, C., Meroni, G., Plebani, P.: Business process monitoring on blockchains: potentials and challenges. In: Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Soffer, P., Zdravkovic, J. (eds.) BPMDS/EMMSAD -2020. LNBIP, vol. 387, pp. 36–51. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49418-6_3
Ellul, J., Pace, G.J.: Runtime verification of ethereum smart contracts. In: 2018 14th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC), pp. 158–163 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/EDCC.2018.00036
Ethereum: Solidity (2016). https://docs.soliditylang.org/. Accessed 10 Jan 2010
Fdhila, W., Rinderle-Ma, S., Knuplesch, D., Reichert, M.: Decomposition-based verification of global compliance in process choreographies. In: 2020 IEEE 24th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC), pp. 77–86 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1109/EDOC49727.2020.00019
Francalanza, A., Pérez, J.A., Sánchez, C.: Runtime verification for decentralised and distributed systems. In: Bartocci, E., Falcone, Y. (eds.) Lectures on Runtime Verification. LNCS, vol. 10457, pp. 176–210. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75632-5_6
Hotz, L., von Riegen, S., Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Schwinghammer, T.: Monitoring bpmn-processes with rules in a distributed environment. In: Aït-Kaci, H., Hu, Y., Nalepa, G.J., Palmirani, M., Roman, D. (eds.) Proceedings of the RuleML2012@ECAI Challenge, at the 6th International Symposium on Rules, Montpellier, France, 27th–29th August 2012. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 874. CEUR-WS.org (2012). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-874/paper12.pdf
Ladleif, J., Friedow, C., Weske, M.: An architecture for multi-chain business process choreographies. In: Abramowicz, W., Klein, G. (eds.) BIS 2020. LNBIP, vol. 389, pp. 184–196. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53337-3_14
Ladleif, J., Weske, M., Weber, I.: Modeling and enforcing blockchain-based choreographies. In: Hildebrandt, T., van Dongen, B.F., Röglinger, M., Mendling, J. (eds.) BPM 2019. LNCS, vol. 11675, pp. 69–85. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_7
López-Pintado, O., GarcÃa-Bañuelos, L., Dumas, M., Weber, I., Ponomarev, A.: CATERPILLAR: A business process execution engine on the ethereum blockchain. CoRR abs/1808.03517 (2018). http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.03517
Mendling, J., et al.: Blockchains for business process management - challenges and opportunities. ACM Trans. Manag. Inf. Syst. 9(1), 1–16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3183367
Mühlberger, R., et al.: Foundational oracle patterns: connecting blockchain to the off-chain world. In: Asatiani, A., et al. (eds.) BPM 2020. LNBIP, vol. 393, pp. 35–51. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58779-6_3
Müller, M., Garzon, S.R.: Blockchain-based trusted cross-organizational deliveries of sensor-equipped parcels. In: Schwardmann, U., et al. (eds.) Euro-Par 2019. LNCS, vol. 11997, pp. 191–202. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48340-1_15
(OMG), O.M.G.: Business process model and notation (bpmn) version 2.0 (January 2011). https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/PDF. Accessed 10 Jan 2010
Sánchez, C., et al.: A survey of challenges for runtime verification from advanced application domains (beyond software). Form. Methods Syst. Des. 54(3), 279–335 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-019-00337-w
Song, D.W., Lee, P.T.: Maritime logistics in the global supply chain (2009)
Tosatto, S., Governatori, G., Beest, N.: Verifying compliance of process compositions through certification of its components. In: 2020 IEEE 24th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC), pp. 87–96. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA (October 2020). https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/EDOC49727.2020.00020
Tran, A.B., Lu, Q., Weber, I.: Lorikeet: a model-driven engineering tool for blockchain-based business process execution and asset management. In: van der Aalst, W.M.P., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the Dissertation Award, Demonstration, and Industrial Track at BPM 2018 co-located with 16th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2018), Sydney, Australia, 9–14 September 2018. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2196, pp. 56–60. CEUR-WS.org (2018). http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2196/BPM_2018_paper_12.pdf
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
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Azzopardi, S., Ellul, J., Pace, G.J. (2021). Runtime Monitoring Processes Across Blockchains. In: Hojjat, H., Massink, M. (eds) Fundamentals of Software Engineering. FSEN 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12818. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89247-0_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89247-0_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-89246-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-89247-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)