Blockchain-based business process management (BPM) framework for service composition in industry 4.0

Abstract

Business process management (BPM) aims to optimize business processes to achieve better system performance such as higher profit, quicker response, and better services. BPM systems in Industry 4.0 are required to digitize and automate business process workflows and support the transparent interoperations of service vendors. The critical bottleneck to advance BPM systems is the evaluation, verification, and transformation of trustworthiness and digitized assets. Most of BPM systems rely heavily on domain experts or third parties to deal with trustworthiness. In this paper, an automated BPM solution is investigated to select and compose services in open business environment, Blockchain technology (BCT) is explored and proposed to transfer and verify the trustiness of businesses and partners, and a BPM framework is developed to illustrate how BCT can be integrated to support prompt, reliable, and cost-effective evaluation and transferring of Quality of Services in the workflow composition and management.