Processes meet Blockchain (Sommersemester 2018)

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Mathias Weske (Business Process Technology)

General Information

• Weekly Hours: 4
• Credits: 6
• Graded: yes
• Enrolment Deadline: 20.04.2018
• Teaching Form: Seminar
• Enrolment Type: Compulsory Elective Module
• Maximum number of participants: 12

Programs, Module Groups & Modules

Description

Blockchain is a technology powering distributed ledgers, which store transactions (e.g., financial ones, function calls, or arbitrary data). The blockchain protocols allow a network to find consensus about the data stored and enable the interaction of participants, who do not necessarily trust each other. While initial blockchain applications (e.g., Bitcoin) store simple transactions, the so called 2nd generation of blockchains (e.g., Ethereum) can store smart contracts (small programs) as well enabling complex transaction.

Recently, more and more blockchain based applications are researched and used in industry. In Business Process Management, they mostly power the execution of inter-organizational processes (process choreographies): store messages, hold a common and global state, or guarantee the correct execution.
 

In this seminar, we work on current research topics of academia and industry. Some topics have real world use cases and are investigated in close cooperation with industry partners such as GoodStack, SAP, parcelBox2Go, and XAIN. Students have the opportunity to cooperate with experts from industry and to work with real world scenarios, data, and customers. We focus on the application of blockchains (Ethereum and XAIN) for various process oriented scenarios (from IoT, Healthcare, and other domains), the evaluation of existing blockchain and process based approaches, as well as the realization of further BPM related concepts.

Students have the opportunity to choose from various topics and work on them individually or in small groups. They will learn and understand blockchain technologies and blockchain based applications, implement small blockchain powered prototypes, and conduct their own research in this field.

Requirements

This seminar is for master students with an interest in blockchain technologies and BPM.

Literature

• Arvind Narayanan et al., Bitcoin and Crytopcurrency Technologies, Princeton University Press 2016
• I. Weber, X. Xu, et al., Untrusted business process monitoring and execution using blockchain. In Intl. Conf. Business Process Mgmt. (BPM), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sept. 2016
• I.Weber, J. Mendling, et al., Blockchains for Business Process Management - Challenges and Opportunities. In ACM Trans. Management Inf. Syst 2018

More (topic specific) literature will be provided during the seminar.

Examination

Each student is graded by

1. an intermediate presentation in the middle of the semester,
2. a final presentation at the end of the semester, and
3. a technical report and an implemented prototype.

Dates

11.04.2018	Kick Off
15.04.2018	Application Deadline
20.04.2018	Registration Deadline
During Semester	Individual Meetings with Supervisors
23.05.2018	Intermediate Presentation
first half of July	Final Presentation
tba	Deadline: Technical Report

Zurück