Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Wattana Viriyasitavat; Li Da Xu; Dusit Niyato; Zhuming Bi; Danupol Hoonsopon

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3217794

IEEE Access (Jan 2022)

Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Wattana Viriyasitavat,
Li Da Xu,
Dusit Niyato,
Zhuming Bi,
Danupol Hoonsopon

Affiliations

Wattana Viriyasitavat: ORCiD; Chulalongkorn Business School, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
Li Da Xu: ORCiD; Department of Information Technology and Decision Sciences, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA
Dusit Niyato: ORCiD; School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Jurong West, Singapore
Zhuming Bi: ORCiD; Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USA
Danupol Hoonsopon: ORCiD; Chulalongkorn Business School, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3217794
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 10
pp. 118900 – 118925

Abstract

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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.

Published in IEEE Access

ISSN: 2169-3536 (Online)
Publisher: IEEE
Country of publisher: United States
LCC subjects: Technology: Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
Website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6287639

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