Process Modeling in Decentralized Organizations Utilizing Blockchain Consensus

Abstract

Blockchain technologies allow for multiple organizations, individuals, and software to become part of a decentralized network where they can reach consensus on the state of the system including all data stored. Due to the ability of reaching consensus even among untrusted actors, the idea of decentralized organizations has been proposed, where both the system components as well as their coordination are distributed. Given such a system of distributed actors, the problem of decentralized coordination for following common goals and planning becomes apparent. This paper addresses the decentralized coordination problem by means of a blockchain-based approach that uses conceptual modeling to reach consensus in decentralized organizations. With a unified view on the processes and instances of distributed actors, the aim is a decentralized planning and execution through models. For this purpose, an existing approach for decentralized process modeling and instance tracking is applied and extended with the possibility for actors to form consensus on an organizational level through blockchain transactions.