A Flexible Approach to Multi-party Business Process Execution on Blockchain

Abstract

In modern business scenarios, more and more organisations have to deal with the critical requirements of trustworthiness and flexibility, when collaborating in multi-party business processes. This calls for new kinds of systems able to manage collaborative processes in untrusted and dynamic environments. Concerning the collaborative perspective, the Business Process Management discipline has provided effective and standardised solutions for a long time, now. Regarding the trustworthiness perspective, blockchain is advocated as one of the most prominent technologies to guarantee trust in a multi-party setting. However, while the immutability of blockchain provides transparent and secure proof of past business interactions, it hinders the flexibility of the business process execution, as the business logic regulating the process execution is immutably stored in the blockchain. On the other hand, flexibility is a property that is becoming crucial in such a setting due to the high dynamism of the business scenarios. In fact, it permits to modify a process at run-time to deal with internal or external changes. In this paper, we face this issue by proposing an architecture for the flexible blockchain-based execution of multi-party business processes. In our approach, business processes are modelled by BPMN choreography diagrams translated into code, whose execution state is then stored in the blockchain. Flexibility is achieved by decoupling the business process’s logic from its execution state, thus allowing run-time changes to the process execution without losing the fundamental properties of trust provided by the blockchain. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we provide a prototypical implementation, called FlexChain, and we use it on a case study from the healthcare application domain. The results obtained by the analysis of cost for the reported case study show the feasibility of the approach. In particular, major costs to sustain relate to one-time operations, such as the deployment and the run-time update of the model, while the most frequent actions are quite efficient.