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International Conference on Business Process Management

BPM 2019: Business Process Management: Blockchain and Central and Eastern Europe Forum pp 119–135Cite as

Executing Collaborative Decisions Confidentially on Blockchains

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 361))

Abstract

Decisions are an important aspect of enterprise operations. Decisions cross the boundary of a single enterprise, if multiple business partners collaborate in the decision making. To ascertain that all the participants behave as expected, blockchains can support collaborative decision making by storing relevant data and executing crucial decision logic in a tamper-proof and transparent manner. However, current blockchain technologies require the participants to publish the decision logic and are, therefore, not suited for sensitive data. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an approach that does not need to reveal sensitive data for supporting decision making. However, in case of a conflict, any participant can call for a blockchain-based conflict resolution at the cost of revealing the decision. To counter false claims that purposely reveal the decision, we provide a blockchain-enforced mechanism that discourages malicious behavior. We implement the approach using the Ethereum blockchain and evaluate the costs of resolving conflicts on a large set of decision models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The shh implementation for Ethereum is called whisper (https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whisper accessed 11/29/2018).

  2. 2.

    Ethereum website: https://ethereum.org (accessed 11/26/18).

  3. 3.

    EOS website: https://www.eos.io (accessed 11/26/18).

  4. 4.

    Tezos website: https://tezos.com (accessed 11/26/19).

  5. 5.

    Source code, binaries, and documentation at https://owncloud.hpi.de/index.php/s/EZrGNPpsjBfHTJH.

  6. 6.

    Based on the average gas price and the average Ether to Euro exchange rate on 11/26/2018 source https://etherscan.io.

  7. 7.

    Evaluated decision tables and results at https://owncloud.hpi.de/index.php/s/EZrGNPpsjBfHTJH.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, 14482, Potsdam, Germany

    Stephan Haarmann, Kimon Batoulis, Adriatik Nikaj & Mathias Weske

Authors
  1. Stephan Haarmann
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  2. Kimon Batoulis
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  3. Adriatik Nikaj
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  4. Mathias Weske
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stephan Haarmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Claudio Di Ciccio

  2. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Renata Gabryelczyk

  3. Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico

    Luciano García-Bañuelos

  4. University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Tomislav Hernaus

  5. IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Rick Hull

  6. University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Mojca Indihar Štemberger

  7. Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Andrea Kő

  8. Data61 (CSIRO) and UNSW, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia

    Mark Staples

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Haarmann, S., Batoulis, K., Nikaj, A., Weske, M. (2019). Executing Collaborative Decisions Confidentially on Blockchains. In: Di Ciccio, C., et al. Business Process Management: Blockchain and Central and Eastern Europe Forum. BPM 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 361. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30429-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30429-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30428-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30429-4

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