Inter-Organisational Business Processes on Blockchain

Inter-organisational business processes involve distributed organisations col- laborating to reach a common objective. Such kinds of processes can be described by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) choreog- raphy diagram, which allows the representation of their interactions from a high-level perspective. However, there is still a lack of support for execution due to the need for a trustworthy infrastructure managing the interactions that occur among distributed parties. Indeed, in a collaborative scenario, trust is subjective and its perception is influenced by technical and organisa- tional aspects. In this context, blockchain is a prominent solution to enable the creation of trustworthy distributed infrastructures. For this reason, the first research objective of the thesis faces the challenge of trust by proposing a model-driven methodology and a related framework, named ChorChain, relying on blockchain to support the development of choreographies from their modelling to execution. The proposed solution uses a BPMN choreography model as starting specification and automatically translates it into a smart contract deployed on the blockchain. This contract enforces the interactions among the cooperating components as prescribed by the choreography model. As well as trust, the thesis identifies other relevant research objec- tives related to the execution of inter-organisational business processes on blockchain. In particular, the thesis focuses also on auditability, flexibility, multiplicity, privacy, and confidentiality. All of them are crucial aspects to consider especially when relying on a blockchain infrastructure. For each objective, the thesis presents a specific contribution, elaborated from the ChorChain framework, that was conceptually and practically extended.The proposed methodology and derived frameworks are assessed through a run- ning example together with real-world and synthetic scenarios.