An Efficient Customized Blockchain System for Inter-Organizational Processes

Blockchain technologies pave a promising way for implementing the inter-organizational processes. Most of the current research works translate the execution logic in the process models into the smart contracts, which can run independently on the blockchain without the outside process engine. However, the works usually suffer from the execution and storage costs, since the translation needs to be done when the processes are deployed. In this paper, we customize a process engine for executing the inter-organizational business processes via a blockchain-style procedure, i.e., checking the validity of transactions, adding the valid transactions into the blockchain through the consensus mechanism, and then updating the process states according to the committed transactions. And then, we build a blockchain system by embedding the customized process engine into the blockchain nodes. Moreover, in order to realize the interactions between the inter-organizational processes running on blockchain and the services outside blockchain, we propose a blockchain-based approach for service registration, binding and invocation, and design a lease-based concurrency control protocol to logically isolate transactions from each other when invoking the services simultaneously. Finally, we implement a prototype system based on a permissioned blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric and a process engine Activiti. The experimental results show the proposed blockchain system can execute the inter-organizational processes correctly and efficiently.