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Blockchain for Business Process Enactment: A Taxonomy and Systematic Literature Review

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Business Process Management: Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, and Central and Eastern Europe Forum (BPM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 459))

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Abstract

Blockchain has been proposed to facilitate the enactment of interorganisational business processes. For such processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of rules and the integrity of execution traces—without the need for a centralised trusted party. However, the enactment of interorganisational processes pose manifold challenges. In this work, we ask what answers the research field offers in response to those challenges. To do so, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). As our guiding question, we investigate the guarantees and capabilities of blockchain-based enactment approaches. Based on this SLR, we develop a taxonomy for blockchain-based enactment. We find that a wide range of approaches support traceability and correctness; however, research focusing on flexibility and scalability remains nascent. For all challenges, we point towards future research opportunities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://scholar.google.com, accessed 2022-05-30.

  2. 2.

    Replication package available at: https://github.com/fstiehle/SLR-blockchain-BP-execution; for convenience, we also include a hosted interactive spreadsheet of our SLR at https://tubcloud.tu-berlin.de/s/M8JQtaRX5JkjXXZ.

  3. 3.

    We define monitoring as approaches where the control-flow is not enforced, but the process trace is still committed to the blockchain to ensure the integrity of the trace.

  4. 4.

    See Gas and fees, https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/, accessed 2022-05-30.

  5. 5.

    Our script and data sets used for calculation can be found at: https://github.com/fstiehle/SLR-blockchain-BP-execution. Historical data was taken from Etherscan (https://etherscan.io/chart/gasprice) and Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ETH-USD/, both accessed 2022-06-01.

  6. 6.

    We here need to remark that [25] is not handling the claimed subset of BPMN correctly; as noted in [16, Sect. 2.2], the OR join is handled incorrectly.

  7. 7.

    We consider finality as the time it takes a transaction to be durably committed with a certain probability e.

  8. 8.

    Blockchain and Mining, Ethereum Whitepaper, https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/blockchain-and-mining, accessed 2022-06-01.

  9. 9.

    https://www.algorand.com, accessed 2022-05-30.

  10. 10.

    https://www.avax.network, accessed 2022-05-30.

  11. 11.

    Layer 2 scaling, Ethereum development documentation, https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/layer-2-scaling, accessed 2022-05-30.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software and Business Engineering, Technische Universitaet Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Fabian Stiehle & Ingo Weber

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  1. Fabian Stiehle
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  2. Ingo Weber
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Correspondence to Fabian Stiehle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Andrea Marrella

  2. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Raimundas Matulevičius

  3. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Renata Gabryelczyk

  4. Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany

    Bernhard Axmann

  5. University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Vesna Bosilj Vukšić

  6. Télécom SudParis, Evry, France

    Walid Gaaloul

  7. University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Mojca Indihar Štemberger

  8. Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Andrea Kő

  9. Data61, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia

    Qinghua Lu

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Stiehle, F., Weber, I. (2022). Blockchain for Business Process Enactment: A Taxonomy and Systematic Literature Review. In: Marrella, A., et al. Business Process Management: Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, and Central and Eastern Europe Forum. BPM 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 459. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16168-1_1

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