Using smart contracts to support collaborative Business Process Modelling and Execution
Business process management (BPM) is concerned with the design, execution, monitoring, and improvement of business processes. Systems that support process execution are extensively used by companies to streamline and automate intra-organizational processes. We want to investigate how distributed ledger/blockchain technologies can assist in providing improved support for BPM contract agreement, BPM model development, and to support collaborative, inter-organisational BPM evolution. There is a need to investigate how blockchain-based business processes can be efficiently specified, deployed, executed and visualized, along with supporting their collaborative modelling and evolution.
This project will begin with a systematic literature review of the use of blockchain approaches for BPM and in particular BPM model development and other collaborative model development approaches. We will then identify key requirements and necessary supporting architectural approaches for blockchain-enabled development of blockchain-based BPM contract and model development. We will prototype a solution and apply this to representative exemplar blockchain-based BPM models, evaluating the tool’s support for both model development and supporting blockchain-based collaborative modelling contracts. This project requires a background in either software engineering, collaborative work and/or business process management solutions from a technical perspective. Some knowledge with blockchain concepts and current APIs for using distributed ledgers would be an advantage.
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