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International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering

CAiSE 2019: Advanced Information Systems Engineering pp 399–414Cite as

Dynamic Role Binding in Blockchain-Based Collaborative Business Processes

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 11483)

Abstract

Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving mutually untrusted parties. Existing tools allow such processes to be modeled using high-level notations and compiled into smart contracts that can be deployed on blockchain platforms. However, these tools brush aside the question of who is allowed to execute which tasks in the process, either by deferring the question altogether or by adopting a static approach where all actors are bound to roles upon process instantiation. Yet, a key advantage of blockchains is their ability to support dynamic sets of actors. This paper presents a model for dynamic binding of actors to roles in collaborative processes and an associated binding policy specification language. The proposed language is endowed with a Petri net semantics, thus enabling policy consistency verification. The paper also outlines an approach to compile policy specifications into smart contracts for enforcement. An experimental evaluation shows that the cost of policy enforcement increases linearly with the number of roles and constraints.

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_25
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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some details (e.g. path expressions to refer to nested subprocesses) are omitted for space reasons and can be found at http://git.io/caterpillar.

  2. 2.

    In Ethereum, gas is linearly related to throughput, see Sect. 2.1. So by answering this question we also indirectly answer the related throughput question.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/trufflesuite/ganache-cli.

  4. 4.

    Gas price: 5 Gwei, average from https://ethgasstation.info on 30/11/2018.

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Acknowledgment

This work was funded by the Estonian Research Council (grant IUT20-55) and the European Regional Development Fund (Dora Plus, contract 36.9-6.1/459).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Orlenys López-Pintado, Marlon Dumas & Luciano García-Bañuelos

  2. Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico

    Luciano García-Bañuelos

  3. Data61, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia

    Ingo Weber

Authors
  1. Orlenys López-Pintado
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  2. Marlon Dumas
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  3. Luciano García-Bañuelos
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  4. Ingo Weber
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Orlenys López-Pintado .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Paolo Giorgini

  2. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Barbara Weber

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López-Pintado, O., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., Weber, I. (2019). Dynamic Role Binding in Blockchain-Based Collaborative Business Processes. In: Giorgini, P., Weber, B. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_25

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