Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Blockchain (BC), as an emerging technology, is revolutionizing Business Process Management (BPM) in multiple ways. The main adoption is to serve as a trusted infrastructure to guarantee the trust of collaborations among multiple partners in trustless environments. Especially, BC enables trust of information by using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). With the power of smart contracts, BC enforces the obligations of counterparties that transact in a business process (BP) by programming the contracts as transactions. This paper aims to study the state-of-the-art of BC technologies by (1) exploring its applications in BPM with the focus on how BC provides the trust of BPs in their lifecycles; (2) identifying the relations of BPM as the need and BC as the solution with the assessment towards BPM characteristics; (3) discussing the up-to-date progresses of critical BC in BPM; (4) identifying the challenges and research directions for future advancement in the domain. The main conclusions of our comprehensive review are (1) the study of adopting BC in BPM has attracted a great deal of attention that has been evidenced by a rapidly growing number of relevant articles. (2) The paradigms of BPM over Internet of Things (IoT) have been shifted from persistent to transient, from static to dynamic, and from centralized to decentralized, and new enabling technologies are highly demanded to fulfill some emerging functional requirements (FRs) at the stages of design, configuration, diagnosis, and evaluation of BPs in their lifecycles. (3) BC has been intensively studied and proven as a promising solution to assure the trustiness for both of business processes and their executions in decentralized BPM. (4) Most of the reported BC applications are at their primary stages, future research efforts are needed to meet the technical challenges involved in interoperation, determination of trusted entities, confirmation of time-sensitive execution, and support of irreversibility.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, business process management, smart contracts, and trust assurance.

Secure data access using blockchain technology through IoT cloud and fabric environment

“…From Table 2, it is observed that the time taken to create a block and validate the transactions is nearly 0.02 ms, while the computation time is approximately 0.03 ms as proposed by the authors in Ref. 6 for a block that can accommodate nearly 600 bits, while in Ref. 16 the time taken to create a single block for nearly 500 bits as maximum block size is as high as 0.9 ms, while the time to validate is nearly 0.7 ms.…”

“…Another difficult issue that requires consideration in the present world is the choice of a platform to handle the logical control of IoT devices. 6 Through the integration of programming methodologies, several metrics, either cost-or distance-based, can be used to find anomalies in the devices. 7 In the current environment, adopting the newest technology trends is difficult, especially with the massive amount of data that is flooding the internet.…”

“…Additionally, there will be a difference in processing speed between physical devices when compared to logical connectivity to complete a task. Another difficult issue that requires consideration in the present world is the choice of a platform to handle the logical control of IoT devices 6 . Through the integration of programming methodologies, several metrics, either cost‐ or distance‐based, can be used to find anomalies in the devices 7 …”

Blockchain Enabled Supply Chain Management

“…Jabbar et al [ 4 ] have discussed about the various issues and challenges in implementing blockchain-enabled supply chain using different case studies and concluded that many organizations have taken steps to build a blockchain-enabled platform for efficient business.…”

“…Dasaklis et al [ 4 ], have done an extensive survey in understanding the implementation of blockchain-enabled supply chains and explored the various features and challenges through research works. The use of blockchains in the production process promises to be an appealing research topic for future studies, especially in the age of cybersecurity.…”