Abstract
Workflow interoperability generally refers to the ability for workflow enactment services to coordinate work. However, the lack of trust is often a roadblock, especially when workflow enactment services interoperate across organizational boundaries. Blockchain technology is a technology for data sharing across a network of untrusted participants. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based workflow interoperability approach. Workflow enactment services communicate and interoperate with each other via blockchain instead of trusting a central authority, but trust is maintained. Furthermore, blockchain documents interoperation of workflow enactment services, such an audit trail can be used to depict a complete inter-organizational collaboration. Our approach comprises the combination of an interoperability interface and a general interoperability service. Interoperability service runs on a blockchain environment, and workflow enactment services can call interoperability service through their interoperability interface to communicate with each other. We implement the prototype of our approach and demonstrate its feasibility by applying it to an inter-organizational collaboration case. We evaluate our approach mainly via conducting a performance evaluation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Hollingsworth, D., Hampshire, U.: Workflow management coalition: the workflow reference model. Document Number TC00-1003, vol. 19, p. 16 (1995)
WfMC, I.: 4–interoperability–abstract specification, WFMC-TC-1012. Technical report (1996)
WfMC: Workflow standard-interoperability wf-xml binding (wfmc-tc-1023, version 1.1) (2001)
Joint Submitters: Workflow management facility, Revised Submission, OMG Document Number: bom/98-06-07 (1998)
W. W. S. Interoperability, Internet e-mail mime binding, document number wfmc-tc-1018
Swenson, K.: Simple workflow access protocol. US Patent 6,574,675, 3 June 2003
Aldred, L.J.: Fundamentals of process integration, Ph.D. dissertation, Queensland University of Technology (2011)
Swenson, K.D., Pradhan, S., Gilger, M.D., Zukowski, M., Cappelaere, P.: Wf-xml 2.0 xml based protocol for run-time integration of process engines, Workflow Management Coalition (2004)
Andrews, T., et al.: Business process execution language for web services (2003)
Jordan, D., et al.: Web services business process execution language version 2.0, vol. 11, no. 120, p. 5, OASIS standard (2007)
BPMN, O.: Business process model and notation (bpmn) (2009)
Fdhila, W., Rinderle-Ma, S., Knuplesch, D., Reichert, M.: Change and compliance in collaborative processes. In: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, pp. 162–169. IEEE (2015)
Panayides, P.M., Lun, Y.V.: The impact of trust on innovativeness and supply chain performance. Int. J. Prod. Econ. 122(1), 35–46 (2009)
Nakamoto, S., et al.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system (2008)
Mendling, J., et al.: Blockchains for business process management-challenges and opportunities. ACM Trans. Manag. Inf. Syst. (TMIS) 9(1), 4 (2018)
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
GarcÃa-Bañuelos, L., Ponomarev, A., Dumas, M., Weber, I.: Optimized execution of business processes on blockchain. In: Carmona, J., Engels, G., Kumar, A. (eds.) BPM 2017. LNCS, vol. 10445, pp. 130–146. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65000-5_8
Prybila, C., Schulte, S., Hochreiner, C., Weber, I.: Runtime verification for business processes utilizing the bitcoin blockchain. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. (2017)
Szabo, N.: The idea of smart contracts, Nick Szabo’s Papers and Concise Tutorials, vol. 6 (1997)
Omohundro, S.: Cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and artificial intelligence. AI Matters 1(2), 19–21 (2014)
Acknowledgements
This work is Supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2017YFB0202200; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61972427,61572539; the Research Foundation of Science and Technology Plan Project in Guangzhou City under Grant No. 201704020092.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fang, Y., Tang, X., Pan, M., Yu, Y. (2020). A Workflow Interoperability Approach Based on Blockchain. In: Hsu, CH., Kallel, S., Lan, KC., Zheng, Z. (eds) Internet of Vehicles. Technologies and Services Toward Smart Cities. IOV 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11894. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38651-1_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38651-1_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38650-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38651-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)