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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Blockchain-Based Traceability of Inter-organisational Business Processes

Authors : Claudio Di Ciccio, Alessio Cecconi, Jan Mendling, Dominik Felix, Dominik Haas, Daniel Lilek, Florian Riel, Andreas Rumpl, Philipp Uhlig

Published in: Business Modeling and Software Design

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Blockchain technology opens up new opportunities for Business Process Management. This is mainly due to its unprecedented capability to let transactions be automatically executed and recorded by Smart Contracts in multi-peer environments, in a decentralised fashion and without central authoritative players to govern the workflow. In this way, blockchains also provide traceability. Traceability of information plays a pivotal role particularly in those supply chains where multiple parties are involved and rigorous criteria must be fulfilled to lead to a successful outcome. In this paper, we investigate how to run a business process in the context of a supply chain on a blockchain infrastructure so as to provide full traceability of its run-time enactment. Our approach retrieves information to trace process instances execution solely from the transactions written on-chain. To do so, hash-codes are reverse-engineered based on the Solidity Smart Contract encoding of the generating process. We show the results of our investigation by means of an implemented software prototype, with a case study on the reportedly challenging context of the pharmaceutical supply chain.

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previous chapter From Strategy to Process Improvement Portfolios and Value Realization

next chapter A Blockchain Architecture for Reducing the Bullwhip Effect

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https://www.ibm.com/cloud/automation-software/business-process-management.

https://hyperledger.org.

https://www.bonitasoft.com.

https://chain.com/technology.

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Title: Blockchain-Based Traceability of Inter-organisational Business Processes
Authors: Claudio Di Ciccio
Alessio Cecconi
Jan Mendling
Dominik Felix
Dominik Haas
Daniel Lilek
Florian Riel
Andreas Rumpl
Philipp Uhlig
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Business Modeling and Software Design
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-94213-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-94214-8

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94214-8_4

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