On the Implementation of Business Process Logic in DLT Nodes

Abstract

Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enable new forms of business collaboration while the combination with smart contracts allows for an automation of business and collaboration processes. The immutability of DLT secures the execution of business processes. Hence, any process automation or resource management activities are tamper-proof. Yet, a widespread use can only takeoff, if business process experts can directly use this new form of technology, since business process experts are not necessarily programming experts. Thus, we argue for a high-level business process modeling to allow an application-oriented formulation of business collaboration. Hence it is important to research the instantiation and execution of business processes on DLTs, which are formulated in conventional notations. Existing approaches for process implementation on DLTs build-upon state machines that encode the process flow in smart contracts. Thereby every process instantiation requires the creation of a new smart contract with its state machine. In contrast we propose a variant of process implementation that builds-upon an extending kernel. The execution logic is encoded as a core function in the validation routine of DLT nodes. Going down this avenue, the process flow is specified inside transactions and the validation routine will ensure that the process is correctly executed. We validate the implementation of our approach and compare it to alternatives that implement processes by state machines across smart contracts.