Abstract
Companies deploy workflow management systems which interpret process models to ensure compliance of operational duties by automatically distribute work items to employees or machinery. Enterprises are often forced to outsource services and join interorganizational collaborations, e.g. in supply chain scenarios, to remain competitive on the market. Today, interorganizational process management cater for interconnecting publicly visible tasks of the participants’ local workflows whereby a predefined message exchange protocol ensures interoperability. Especially in flexible large-scale collaboration scenarios, this strategy lacks in global monitoring or transparent data-based routing the control flow due to a missing central controlling instance or global accessible data. Blockchain technology promises to automatically run applications in a decentralized fashion without any trusted third party needed, as participants will agree on a common valid state algorithmically. We capitalize on this consensus finding mechanism and tamper-resistant data storage to propose a novel form of workflow interoperability for interorganizational workflows which autonomously orchestrates the process in-between. The approach solves issues regarding the monitoring of the global state, the distribution of work items to the respective business partners and achieves data-based routing by holding in-process variables decentralized in a trustworthy fashion.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
A widely used open-source BPMS: https://camunda.com/.
- 2.
\(\mathfrak {P(\mathcal {T})}\) describes the cartesian product of \(\mathcal {T}\).
- 3.
For block-structured processes.
- 4.
References
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Weske, M.: The P2P approach to interorganizational workflows. In: Dittrich, K.R., Geppert, A., Norrie, M.C. (eds.) CAiSE 2001. LNCS, vol. 2068, pp. 140–156. Springer, Heidelberg (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45341-5_10
van der Aalst, W.: Interorganizational workflows: an approach based on message sequence charts and petri nets. In: Systems Analysis Modelling Simulation (1999)
Castro, M., Liskov, B.: Practical byzantine fault tolerance. In: Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, OSDI 1999 (1999)
Di Ciccio, C., et al.: Blockchain-Based Traceability of Inter-organisational Business Processes (2018)
Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Fundamentals of Business Process Management, 2nd edn., pp. 341–369. Springer, Heidelberg (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-56509-4_9
Falazi, G., Hahn, M., Breitenbücher, U., Leymann, F.: Modeling and execution of blockchain-aware business processes. SICS Softw. Intensiv. Cyber-Phys. Syst. 34, 1–12 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-019-00399-5
Fridgen, G., Radszuwill, S., Urbach, N., Utz, L.: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management Using Blockchain Technology (2018)
Hull, R., Batra, V.S., Chen, Y.-M., Deutsch, A., Heath III, F.F.T., Vianu, V.: Towards a shared ledger business collaboration language based on data-aware processes. In: Sheng, Q.Z., Stroulia, E., Tata, S., Bhiri, S. (eds.) ICSOC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9936, pp. 18–36. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46295-0_2
Idelberger, F., Governatori, G., Riveret, R., Sartor, G.: Evaluation of logic-based smart contracts for blockchain systems. In: Alferes, J.J.J., Bertossi, L., Governatori, G., Fodor, P., Roman, D. (eds.) RuleML 2016. LNCS, vol. 9718, pp. 167–183. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42019-6_11
Jablonski, S., Bussler, C.: Workflow Management: Modeling Concepts, Architecture, and Implementation (1996)
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
Legner, C., Wende, K.: The challenges of inter-organizational business process design - a research agenda. In: Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2007 (2007)
Lindert, F., Deiters, W.: Modelling inter-organizational processes with process model fragments. In: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 24 (1999)
Liu, C., Li, Q., Zhao, X.: Challenges and opportunities in collaborative business process management: Overview of recent advances. Inf. Syst. Front. 11, 201–209 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-008-9089-0
López-Pintado, O., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., Weber, I.: Dynamic role binding in blockchain-based collaborative business processes. In: Giorgini, P., Weber, B. (eds.) CAiSE 2019. LNCS, vol. 11483, pp. 399–414. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_25
López-Pintado, O., García-Bañuelos, L., Dumas, M., Weber, I., Ponomarev, A.: Caterpillar: a business process execution engine (...). Softw. Pract. Exp. 49, 1162–1193 (2019)
López-Pintado, O., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., Weber, I.: Interpreted Execution of Business Process Models on Blockchain (2019)
Madsen, M.F., Gaub, M., Høgnason, T., Kirkbro, M.E., Slaats, T., Debois, S.: Collaboration among adversaries: distributed workflow execution on a blockchain. In: Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain (2018)
Merz, M., Liberman, B., Muller-Jones, K., Lamersdorf, W.: Interorganisational Workflow Management With Mobile Agents in COSM (1996)
Nakamura, H., Miyamoto, K., Kudo, M.: Inter-organizational business processes managed by blockchain. In: Hacid, H., Cellary, W., Wang, H., Paik, H.-Y., Zhou, R. (eds.) WISE 2018. LNCS, vol. 11233, pp. 3–17. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02922-7_1
OMG: Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Version 2.0.2 (2013)
Prybila, C., Schulte, S., Hochreiner, C., Weber, I.: Runtime verification for business processes utilizing the bitcoin blockchain. CoRR (2017)
Sturm, C., Scalanczi, J., Schönig, S., Jablonski, S.: A blockchain-based and resource-aware process execution engine. FGCS J. 100, 19–34 (2019)
Sturm, C., Szalanczi, J., Schönig, S., Jablonski, S.: A lean architecture for blockchain based decentralized process execution. In: Daniel, F., Sheng, Q.Z., Motahari, H. (eds.) BPM 2018. LNBIP, vol. 342, pp. 361–373. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11641-5_29
Tran, A.B., Lu, Q., Weber, I.: Lorikeet: a model-driven engineering tool for blockchain-based business process execution (...). In: BPM (2018)
van der Aalst, W.: Process-oriented architectures for electronic commerce and interorganizational workflow. Inf. Syst. 24, 639–671 (1999)
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
Weske, M.: Business Process Management. Concepts, Languages, Architectures, 3rd edn. Springer, Heidelberg (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28616-2
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sturm, C., Szalanczi, J., Jablonski, S., Schönig, S. (2020). Decentralized Control: A Novel Form of Interorganizational Workflow Interoperability. In: Grabis, J., Bork, D. (eds) The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. PoEM 2020. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 400. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63479-7_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63479-7_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-63478-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-63479-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)