A Case Study of Execution of Untrusted Business Process on Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

Many studies have been done to improve the performance of centrally controlled business processes and enhance the integration between different parties of these collaborations. However, the most serious issues of collaborative business processes remained unsolved in these studies - lack of trust and divided data on various confidential ledgers. Blockchain technology has enormous potential to become a new substantial integration method for untrusted collaborative businesses. Using the governing consensus mechanism, blockchain eliminates the necessity of the trusted third party. It provides a distributed shared ledger which facilitates the job of the process monitoring for the parties. The smart contract, as a crucial tool, is used to define the guaranteed autonomous programs. In addition, the privacy of the data can be ensured by using a permissioned blockchain that handles the access control because, in this way, only verifiable participants can have access to the state of the business process and its related information. In this study, the applicability of execution of a real-world untrusted business process on the permissioned blockchain is investigated. Moreover, we determine the advantages of using the permissioned access-controller blockchain as the infrastructure for the collaborative business processes, through implementing the process of Order Processing on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform.