Towards a Trustworthy and Adaptive Execution of Business Process Choreographies

Blockchain technologies have emerged to serve as a trust basis for the monitoring and execution of business processes, particularly business process choreographies. However, dealing with changes in smart contract-enabled business processes remains an open issue. For any required modification to an existing smart contract (SC), a new version of the SC with a new address is deployed on the blockchain and stored in a contract registry. Moreover, in a choreography, a change in a partner process might affect the processes of other partners, and thus, must be propagated to partners affected by the change. In this paper, we propose an approach overcoming the limitations of SCs and allowing for the change management of blockchain-enabled declarative business process choreographies modeled as DCR graphs. Our approach allows a partner in a running blockchain-based DCR choreography instance to change its private process. A change impacting other partners is propagated to their processes in a decentralized manner using a SC. The change propagation mechanism ensures the compatibility checks between public processes of the partners and the consistency between the private and public processes of one partner. We demonstrate the approach’s feasibility through an implemented prototype and its effectiveness via a set of evaluation tests.