The Rise of Enforceable Business Processes from the Hashes of Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts

Abstract

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Over the past few decades, the automation of inter-organizational processes has been the focus of several research efforts that have produced a broad spectrum of design methods and technologies. Recently, some experiments have shown how in principle a Decentralized Autonomous Process-Aware Information System (DAIS) can be implemented by means of Blockchain-based Smart Contracts (BSCs). In this paper, we cast a shadow on this novel approach by arguing that such kind of contracts cannot be considered an optimal abstraction to specify inter-organizational process models. We base our analysis on contractual incompleteness, a pivotal concept in widely accep..