A Subscription Service for Automated Communication and Fair Cost Distribution in Collaborative Blockchainbased Business Processes

Abstract

Blockchain capabilities like Ethereum Smart Contracts offer great opportunities to manage cross-organizational business processes due to their trustless and tamperproof nature. However, communication in such processes poses a major issue since there is no direct option for one participating organization to inform other collaborators about their individual progress in their impersonation as a Smart Contract. As that knowledge is vital to execute a cross-organizational process, we design a Smart Contract architecture in which participants express their progress through Blockchain events. Furthermore, we implement a prototype that subscribes to the relevant events of one or more participants and reacts to their occurrence by triggering the subsequent step(s) of the process. Evaluation of the prototype and architecture shows that this does not only avoid unnecessary latency in process communication but also results in a fair cost distribution as each participant is only charged for the expenses of its individual actions.