Abstract The usage of process choreographies and decentralized Business Process Management Systems has been named as an alternative to centralized business process orchestration. In choreographies, control over a process instance is shared between independent parties, and no party has full control or knowledge during process runtime. Nevertheless, it is necessary to monitor and verify process instances during runtime for purposes of documentation, accounting, or compensation. To achieve business process runtime verification, this work explores the suitability of the Bitcoin blockchain to create a novel solution for choreographies. The resulting approach is realized in a fully-functional software prototype. This software solution is evaluated in a qualitative comparison. Findings show that our blockchain-based approach enables a seamless execution monitoring and verification of choreographies, while at the same time preserving anonymity and independence of the process participants. Furthermore, the prototype is evaluated in a performance analysis.
Cross-organizational business processes gain more and more attention in the scientific community. For modeling these processes, choreographies are an adequate solution to describe the observable behavior for each business participant and the corresponding protocols between them. Nevertheless, current approaches mainly focus on modeling and conformance checking before runtime. In contrast, this contribution concentrates on the runtime validation of choreographies and will thus propose a monitoring infrastructure that supports this validation. We will sketch the requirements for a monitoring infrastructure as well as the solutions in order to meet these requirements. Without such a reliable monitoring framework, a runtime validation framework simply would not be able to correctly validate the interactions. In to days economy, collaborative computing grows in importance. Inter-organizational service-based processes are increasingly adopted by different companies when they cannot achieve goals on their own. As a result, conformance problems arise and it must be ensured that the integrity of processes execution remains guaranteed. In this paper, we propose new components, to be deployed along the boundaries of each participating organization, offering external flow control, and notification in case of violation detection, while providing process execution traceability. To achieve our goals, we propose an event-based approach in which inter-organizational exchanges are perceived as events. We define event patterns for filtering the desirable incoming and outgoing messages.