Abstract
Blockchain technology, originally popularized by cryptocurrencies, has been proposed as an infrastructure technology with applications in many areas of business management. Blockchains provide an immutable record of transactions, which makes them useful in situations where actors must cooperate but may not fully trust each other. In this paper, we examine the use of proof-of-work blockchains for executing inter-organizational workflows. We discuss architectural options and describe two prototype implementations of a blockchain-based workflow management system (WfMS), highlighting differences to traditional WfMS. Our main contribution is the identification of potential problems raised by proof-of-work blockchain infrastructure and recommendations to address them.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Source code available from the corresponding author’s web site at https://joerg.evermann.ca/software.html.
References
Acu B, Reisig W. Compensation in workflow nets. In: Donatelli S, Thiagarajan PS, editors. Petri nets and other models of concurrency—ICATPN 2006. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 4024. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2006. https://doi.org/10.1007/11767589_5.
Alonso G, Mohan C, Günthör R, Agrawal D, Abbadi AE, Kamath M. Exotica/FMQM: a persistent message-based architecture for distributed workflow management. In: Sölvberg A, Krogstie J, Seltveit AH, editors. Information systems development for decentralized organizations. IFIP—The International Federation for Information Processing. Boston: Springer; 1995. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34871-1_1.
Androulaki E, Cachin C, De Caro A, Sorniotti A, Vukolic M. Permissioned blockchains and hyperledger fabric. ERCIM News. 2017;110:9–10.
Atluri V, Chun SA, Mukkamala R, Mazzoleni P. A decentralized execution model for inter-organizational workflows. Distrib Parallel Databases. 2007;22(1):55–83.
Bauer T, Dadam P. A distributed execution environment for large-scale workflow management systems with subnets and server migration. In: Proceedings of CoopIS 97: 2nd IFCIS Conference on Cooperative Information Systems. Kiawah Island; 1997. pp. 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1109/COOPIS.1997.613807.
Bauer T, Dadam P. Efficient distributed workflow management based on variable server assignments. In: Wangler B, Bergman L, editors. Advanced information systems engineering. CAiSE 2000. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 1789. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2000. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45140-4_8.
Castro M, Liskov B. Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Trans Comput Syst. 2002;20(4):398–461.
Chebbi I, Dustdar S, Tata S. The view-based approach to dynamic inter-organizational workflow cooperation. Data Knowl Eng. 2006;56(2):139–73.
Ciccio CD, Cecconi A, Dumas M, Garcia-Banuelos L, Lopez-Pintado O, Lu Q, Mendling J, Ponomarev A, Tran AB, Weber I. Blockchain support for collaborative business processes. Inf Spektr. 2019;42(3):182–90.
Das S, Kochut K, Miller J, Sheth A, Worah D. ORBWork: A reliable distributed CORBA-based workflow enactment system for METEOR2; 1999.
Dogac A, et al. Design and implementation of a distributed workflow management system: METUFlow. In: Doğaç A, Kalinichenko L, Özsu MT, Sheth A, editors. Workflow management systems and interoperability. NATO ASI Series (Series F: computer and systems sciences), vol. 164. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 1998. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-58908-9_4.
Eder J, Liebhart W. Workflow recovery. In: Proceedings First IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems. Brussels; 1996. pp. 124–34. https://doi.org/10.1109/COOPIS.1996.555004.
Eder J, Panagos E. Towards distributed workflow process management. In: Bussler C, Grefen PWPJ, Ludwig H, Shan M (eds.) Proceedings of the workshop on cross-organisational workflow management and co-ordination, vol. 17 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings; 1999.
Fakas GJ, Karakostas B. A peer to peer (P2P) architecture for dynamic workflow management. Inf Softw Technol. 2004;46(6):423–31.
Falazi G, Hahn M, Breitenbücher U, Leymann F. Modeling and execution of blockchain-aware business processes. SICS Softw Intensive Cyber Phys Syst. 2019a;34(2–3):105–16.
Falazi G, Hahn M, Breitenbücher U, Leymann F, Yussupov V. Process-based composition of permissioned and permissionless blockchain smart contracts. In: IEEE 23rd international enterprise distributed object computing conference (EDOC). Paris. 2019; pp. 77–87. https://doi.org/10.1109/EDOC.2019.00019.
Fridgen G, Radszuwill S, Urbach N, Utz L. Cross-organizational workflow management using Blockchain technology—towards applicability, auditability, and automation. In: Bui T, editor. 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, {HICSS} 2018, Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii, USA, Jan 3–6, 2018. ScholarSpace/{AIS}Electronic Library (AISeL); 2018. pp. 1–10. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/50332.
García-Bañuelos L, Ponomarev A, Dumas M, Weber I. Optimized execution of business processes on Blockchain. In: Carmona J, Engels G, Kumar A, editors. Business process management. BPM 2017. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 10445. Cham: Springer; 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65000-5_8.
Geppert A, Tombros D. Event-based distributed workflow execution with EVE. In: Davies N, Jochen S, Raymond K, editors. Middleware’98. London: Springer; 1998. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-1283-9_26.
Gillmann M, Weissenfels J, Weikum G, Kraiss A. Performance and availability assessment for the configuration of distributed workflow management systems. In: Zaniolo C, Lockemann PC, Scholl MH, Grust T, editors. Advances in database technology—EDBT 2000. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 1777. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2000. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46439-5_12.
Grefen P, Aberer K, Hoffner Y, Ludwig H. CrossFlow: cross-organizational workflow management in dynamic virtual enterprises. Comput Syst Sci Eng. 2000;15(5):277–90.
Grefen P, Vonk J, Apers P. Global transaction support for workflow management systems: from formal specification to practical implementation. VLDB J. 2001;10(4):316–33.
Härer F. Decentralized business process modeling and instance tracking secured by a blockchain. In: Bednar PM, Frank U, Kautz K, editors. 26th European Conference on Information Systems: Beyond Digitization—Facets of Socio-Technical Change, {ECIS} 2018, Portsmouth, UK, June 23–28, 2018. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2018\_rp/55
Hukkinen T, Mattila J, Seppälä T, et al. Distributed workflow management with smart contracts. The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy: Technical report; 2017.
Jin L, Casati F, Sayal M, Shan M-C. Load balancing in distributed workflow management system. In: Proceedings of the 2001 ACM symposium on applied computing (SAC '01). New York: Association for Computing Machinery; 2001. pp. 522–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/372202.372452
Ladleif J, Weske M, Weber I. Modeling and enforcing blockchain-based choreographies. In: Hildebrandt T, van Dongen B, Röglinger M, Mendling J, editors. Business process management. BPM 2019. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 11675. Cham: Springer; 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_7.
López-Pintado O, García-Bañuelos L, Dumas M, Weber I. Caterpillar: A blockchain-based business process management system. In: Clarisó R, Leopold H, Mendling J, van der Aalst WMP, Kumar A, Pentland BT, Weske M (eds.) Proceedings of the BPM demo track co-located with 15th international conference on business process modeling, vol. 1920 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 2017.
Mendling J, Weber I, Aalst WVD, Brocke JV, Cabanillas C, Daniel F, Debois S, Di Ciccio C, Dumas M, Dustdar S, Gal A, García-Bañuelos L, Governatori G, Hull R, La Rosa M, Leopold H, Leymann F, Recker J, Reichert M, Reijers HA, Rinderle-Ma S, Solti A, Rosemann M, Schulte S, Singh MP, Slaats T, Staples M, Weber B, Weidlich M, Weske M, Xu X, Zhu L. Blockchains for business process management—challenges and opportunities. ACM Trans Manage Inf Syst. 2018;9:1. https://doi.org/10.1145/3183367(Article4;February2018,16pages).
Miller JA, Palaniswami D, Sheth AP, Kochut K, Singh H. Webwork: Meteor\({}_{\text{2 }}\)’s web-based workflow management system. J Intell Inf Syst. 1998;10(2):185–215.
Miller JA, Sheth AP, Kochut KJ, Wang X. CORBA-based run-time architectures for workflow management systems. J Database Manag. 1996;7(1):16–27.
Muth P, Wodtke D, Weißenfels J, Dittrich AK, Weikum G. From centralized workflow specification to distributed workflow execution. J Intell Inf Syst. 1998;10(2):159–84.
Prybila C, Schulte S, Hochreiner C, Weber I. Runtime verification for business processes utilizing the bitcoin blockchain. Future Gener Comput Syst. 2020;107:816–31.
Reichert M, Bauer T. Supporting Ad-Hoc Changes in distributed workflow management systems. In: Meersman R, Tari Z, editors. On the move to meaningful internet systems 2007: CoopIS, DOA, ODBASE, GADA, and IS. OTM 2007. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 4803. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2007. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76848-7_11.
Reichert M, Rinderle S, Dadam P. ADEPT workflow management system. In: van der Aalst WMP, Weske M, editors. Business process management. BPM 2003. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 2678. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2003. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44895-0_25.
Rimba P, Tran AB, Weber I, Staples M, Ponomarev A, Xu X. Comparing Blockchain and cloud services for business process execution. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA). Gothenburg; 2017. pp. 257–60. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSA.2017.44.
Sousa J, Bessani A, Vukolic M. A Byzantine fault-tolerant ordering service for the Hyperledger fabric Blockchain platform. In: 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). Luxembourg City; 2018. pp. 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN.2018.00018.
Ter Hofstede AH, Van der Aalst WM, Adams M, Russell N, editors. Modern business process automation: YAWL and its support environment. New York: Springer; 2009.
van der Aalst W. Loosely coupled interorganizational workflows: modeling and analyzing workflows crossing organizational boundaries. Inf Manag. 2000;37(2):67–75.
van der Aalst WM, ter Hofstede AH, Kiepuszewski B, Barros AP. Workflow patterns. Distrib Parallel Databases. 2003;14(1):5–51.
van der Aalst WMP. The application of petri nets to workflow management. J Circuits Syst Comput. 1998;8(1):21–66.
van der Aalst WMP. Process-oriented architectures for electronic commerce and interorganizational workflow. Inf Syst. 1999;24(8):639–71.
van der Aalst WMP. Inheritance of interorganizational workflows to enable business-to-business. Electron Commer Res. 2002;2(3):195–231.
van der Aalst WMP. Inheritance of interorganizational workflows: how to agree to disagree without loosing control? Inf Technol Manage. 2003;4(4):345–89.
van der Aalst WMP, Weske M. The P2P approach to Interorganizational Workflows. In: Dittrich KR, Geppert A, Norrie MC, editors. Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2001. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 2068. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2001. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45341-5_10.
Vossen G, Weske M. The WASA2 object-oriented workflow management system. In: Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data (SIGMOD '99). New York: Association for Computing Machinery; 1999. pp. 587–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/304182.304586.
Vukolić M. The quest for scalable Blockchain fabric: proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In: Camenisch J, Kesdoğan D, editors. Open problems in network security. iNetSec 2015. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 9591. Cham: Springer; 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39028-4_9.
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, editors. Business process management. BPM 2016. Lecture notes in computer science, vol. 9850. Cham: Springer; 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_19.
Weigand H, van den Heuvel W. Cross-organizational workflow integration using contracts. Decis Support Syst. 2002;33(3):247–65.
Yan J, Yang Y, Raikundalia GK. Swindew-a p2p-based decentralized workflow management system. IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern Part A. 2006;36(5):922–35.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Evermann, J., Kim, H. Workflow Management on Proof-of-Work Blockchains: Implications and Recommendations. SN COMPUT. SCI. 2, 44 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-020-00387-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-020-00387-6