Blockchain Applications for Business Process Management

Dear Colleagues,

Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt the environment in which business processes operate. Due to its distributed tamper-resistant nature, multiple parties can share a single source of truth, enabling trustworthy process execution and monitoring. Given these new business opportunities and the inherent complexity of blockchain technology, it is critical to support the systematic modelling of blockchain-based interactions prior to process execution on a blockchain network. However, there is a lack of standard notations or guidelines for modelling blockchain-oriented processes, especially in representing blockchain-specific patterns, such as propagation of transactions, consensus mechanisms, tokenization of assets, on-chain and off-chain data management, security aspects, etc. To this extent, there is a necessity for the Business Process Management (BPM) community to forward research on blockchain applications for business processes.

The contributions should be relevant for researchers and analysts from both business and IT, who use process models to understand the technology, create documentation, support communication between users and developers, and provide input to the model-driven engineering of smart contracts.

This Special Issue offers a venue for researchers and practitioners to contribute their original and high-quality research papers on the intersection of blockchain technology and BPM, with a focus on applications of blockchain to business processes. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Modelling of blockchain-based business processes;
• Blockchain-oriented extensions of existing modelling notations;
• Challenges of conventional modelling techniques specific to blockchain peculiarities;
• Identification and design of commonly occurring patterns specific to blockchain applications;
• Model-driven engineering of smart contracts;
• Design and implementation of blockchain-based Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs);
• Redesign of blockchain-based business processes;
• BPM lifecycle support for the management of blockchain-based business processes;
• Blockchain support for collaborative business processes;
• Simulation of blockchain-based processes;
• Blockchain for business process monitoring.

Dr. Kostas Vergidis
Dr. George Tsakalidis
Guest Editors

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