Advanced Techniques to Improve Collaborative Business Process Management into Blockchain Context

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last decade, the use of process engineering principles in numerous environments is accepted worldwide as a mechanism to increase the excellence, productivity, competitiveness, efficiency, and quality of any kind of organization as well as to reduce costs. In this context, BPM (Business Process Management) is a well-known business strategy to achieve these goals while obtaining various advantages.

The business process definition is traditionally oriented to be executed centrally for a single company. In fact, there are many technologies (known as BPM Suites) to manage, implement, and execute these processes and, although this technology allows assigning specific tasks of the process to external actors, all those tasks are orchestrated in a centralized way at the process level. This centralized architecture is appropriate for single companies, but it is not efficient when it is necessary to jointly involve multiple entities or companies into Collaborative Business Processes (CBP).

Moreover, over the last decade, new technology has emerged that could provide a technological solution to execute and manage CBP. We refer to BlockChain Technology (BCT), which offers valued cost reductions by enabling transactions to be run peer-to-peer, directly between entities or individual users. This execution can be carried out without requiring mutual trust between each party. These features have led to a rapid and growing attention on blockchain to build decentralized software applications whose architecture is based on shared agreements on processes and decentralized data. Taking this context into account, it is possible to generate interest in knowing the feasibility and opportunities that BCT offers to improve the process management in a decentralized manner. 

This Special Issue aims to gather both academic and industrial communities that intend to submit their contributions on the abovementioned topics, thus advancing modeling techniques, approaches, or methods to improve collaborative BPM in the BCT context.

Prof. Dr. Julián Alberto García-García
Ms. Leticia Morales-Trujillo
Guest Editors

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• process management
• blockchain
• collaborative business processes
• process modelling
• process execution
• modelling techniques, approaches or methods
• modelling tools