A Blockchain-Based Approach for Trust Management in Collaborative Business Processes

Blockchain is becoming a powerful technology for re-engineering collaborative business processes implemented on Web-based distributed systems, spanning across enterprises. On the blockchain, cross-organisation Web services orchestrated to form collaborative business processes can be transparently deployed as smart contracts. However, proper methods and tools are required to guide the process designer for exploiting the blockchain technology. To preserve data and business logics ownership and to ensure performance/cost tradeoff, only data and process activities requiring transparency and trust among the distributed process actors should be stored as transactions on the blockchain and deployed as smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a tool that rely on methodological steps to support blockchain-based trust management in Web-based collaborative business processes originally designed according to a centralised BPM strategy. The methodology and the tool are grounded on a set of criteria, properly enforced with metrics, to identify trust-demanding elements to be considered for their deployment on the blockchain. The approach has been validated on a real case study of food quality certification in the biological domain.