Nowadays, to remain competitive, organizations must be able to easily create and maintain relationships with other organizations. As a consequence, internal business processes of an organization may relate to activities that are performed by other organizations. The resulting multi-party business processes are modelled through the so-called choreographies that are built upon obligations among their participants that define how their interactions should be carried out. To simplify the definition of such obligations, social commitments have been proposed as a way to define and model the mutual contract relationships between the participants of a business process. However, checking the compliance of such commitments can be cumbersome since an organization can only monitor the activities that belong to their realms: the participants of a multi-party business process do not know how the other actors performed their internal tasks, this is of particular importance when these activities involve physical artifacts. To address this issue, the research has recently focused on the utilization of smart devices attached to physical artifacts in order to monitor their status. Nevertheless, when monitoring multi-party business processes participants may not trust each other with respect to the validity of the information used for the evaluation of the commitments. Since relying on a trusted third party to collect and analyze information relevant for the monitoring is rarely possible in this domain, the Business Process Management community has been investigating how blockchain technology could be adopted. In fact, by using a blockchain-based architecture, organizations could leverage on the IoT paradigm without relying on a central trusted authority. Furthermore, some blockchain solutions, such as Ethereum, can run programs, named smart contracts, that enable organizations to move on-chain the execution of certain activities. The goal of this thesis is to investigate how blockchain can be beneficial for monitoring multi-party business processes, where both physical and digital artifacts are involved, to avoid the need to have a central trusted authority. In particular, the proposed approach will leverage on smart contracts to decentralize the evaluation of the commitments and allow the participants to retrieve and to verify their status.
Al giorno d’oggi le organizzazioni, per rimanere competitive, devono essere in grado di instaurare e mantenere relazioni tra di loro in modo agevole. Ciò potrebbe pertanto significare che i loro processi business interni possano essere correlati ad attività svolte da altre organizzazioni. I processi inter-organizzativi che ne conseguono vengono modellati attraverso le così dette coreografie, che si fondano su obblighi concordati tra le parti e che definiscono le modalità di esecuzione delle interazioni. Al fine di semplificare la definizione di questi obblighi, la ricerca si è concentrata sui social commitments, uno strumento in grado di definire e modellare le mutue relazioni contrattuali dei partecipanti di un processo business. Tuttavia, controllare la conformità di questi commitments può essere arduo, poiché la capacità di monitoraggio di un’organizzazione è limitata alle sole attività che appartengo al suo dominio: i partecipanti di un processo business, infatti, non sono a conoscenza di come gli altri attori svolgono le attività interne di loro competenza, soprattutto quando queste prevedono lo scambio di artefatti fisici. Per affrontare questo problema, la ricerca si è recentemente concentrata sull’utilizzo di dispositivi intelligenti che collegati agli artefatti fisici ne possono monitorare lo stato. Ciononostante, durante il monitoraggio dei processi inter-organizzativi, i partecipanti potrebbero dubitare della validità delle informazioni raccolte, informazioni che sono indispensabili per la valutazione dei commitments. Poiché affidarsi ad un’entità terza attendibile per raccogliere ed analizzare i dati utili al monitoraggio è raramente possibile in questo dominio, la comunità BPM (Business Process Management) si è lungamente interrogata su come sfruttare e trarre beneficio dalla tecnologia blockchain. Infatti, utilizzando un’architettura basata su blockchain, le organizzazioni possono far leva sul paradigma IoT senza dover ricorrere ad un’autorità centrale di fiducia. Inoltre, alcune soluzioni blockchain, come Ethereum, sono in grado di eseguire programmi on-chain, chiamati smart contracts, i quali permettono alle organizzazioni di decentralizzare l’esecuzione di determinate attività. L’obiettivo di questa tesi è quello di investigare come il monitoraggio dei processi inter-organizzativi, che coinvolgono artefatti digitali e fisici, potrebbe trarre beneficio dall’utilizzo della tecnologia blockchain, al fine di evitare il ricorso ad una autorità centrale di fiducia. In particolare, l’approccio proposto sfrutterà l’utilizzo degli smart contracts con l’obiettivo di decentralizzare la valutazione dei commitments e di permettere ai partecipanti di recuperare e controllarne lo stato.
Enforcing commitments with blockchain : an approach to generate smart contracts for choreographed business processes
BERTOLINI, MARCELLO
2019/2020
Abstract
Nowadays, to remain competitive, organizations must be able to easily create and maintain relationships with other organizations. As a consequence, internal business processes of an organization may relate to activities that are performed by other organizations. The resulting multi-party business processes are modelled through the so-called choreographies that are built upon obligations among their participants that define how their interactions should be carried out. To simplify the definition of such obligations, social commitments have been proposed as a way to define and model the mutual contract relationships between the participants of a business process. However, checking the compliance of such commitments can be cumbersome since an organization can only monitor the activities that belong to their realms: the participants of a multi-party business process do not know how the other actors performed their internal tasks, this is of particular importance when these activities involve physical artifacts. To address this issue, the research has recently focused on the utilization of smart devices attached to physical artifacts in order to monitor their status. Nevertheless, when monitoring multi-party business processes participants may not trust each other with respect to the validity of the information used for the evaluation of the commitments. Since relying on a trusted third party to collect and analyze information relevant for the monitoring is rarely possible in this domain, the Business Process Management community has been investigating how blockchain technology could be adopted. In fact, by using a blockchain-based architecture, organizations could leverage on the IoT paradigm without relying on a central trusted authority. Furthermore, some blockchain solutions, such as Ethereum, can run programs, named smart contracts, that enable organizations to move on-chain the execution of certain activities. The goal of this thesis is to investigate how blockchain can be beneficial for monitoring multi-party business processes, where both physical and digital artifacts are involved, to avoid the need to have a central trusted authority. In particular, the proposed approach will leverage on smart contracts to decentralize the evaluation of the commitments and allow the participants to retrieve and to verify their status.| File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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https://hdl.handle.net/10589/154402