An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Blockchain has numerous benefits such as decentralisation, persistency, anonymity and auditability. There is a wide spectrum of blockchain applications ranging from cryptocurrency, financial services, risk management, internet of things (IoT) to public and social services. Although a number of studies focus on using the blockchain technology in various application aspects, there is no comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology in both technological and application perspectives. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology. In particular, this paper gives the blockchain taxonomy, introduces typical blockchain consensus algorithms, reviews blockchain applications and discusses technical challenges as well as recent advances in tackling the challenges. Moreover, this paper also points out the future directions in the blockchain technology.

Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey

The Object Management Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) strategy envisages a world where models play a more direct role in software production, being amenable to manipulation and transformation by machine. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is wider in scope than MDA. MDE combines process and analysis with architecture. This article sets out a framework for model driven engineering, which can be used as a point of reference for activity in this area. It proposes an organisation of the modelling 'space' and how to locate models in that space. It discusses different kinds of mappings between models. It explains why process and architecture are tightly connected. It discusses the importance and nature of tools. It identifies the need for defining families of languages and transformations, and for developing techniques for generating/configuring tools from such definitions. It concludes with a call to align metamodelling with formal language engineering techniques.

Model Driven Engineering

A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues

Brian Thompson is a Senior Nutrition Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO is an intergovernmental organization, it has 191 Member Nations, two associate members and one member organization, the European Union. As a knowledge organization, FAO creates and shares critical information about food, agriculture and natural resources in the form of global public goods. FAO plays a connector role, through identifying and working with different partners with established expertise, and facilitating a dialogue between those who have the knowledge and those who need it. By turning knowledge into action, FAO links the field to national, regional and global initiatives in a mutually reinforcing cycle. Its mandate is to raise levels of nutrition and standards of living. What is the size of the malnutrition problem and what regions are most affected? There are persistently high levels of undernutrition. Nearly 870 million people in the world go to bed hungry (1 in 8 people) according to the recently released report of The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (SOFI) and 2 billion have some form of micronutrient malnutrition – this constitutes a crime against humanity and is a responsibility for all of us. Prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries has declined over the past two decades, from 23 to 15 percent. In terms of total numbers in 1990– 92, around 980 million individuals were estimated to be undernourished. The number dropped to 901 million in 1999– 2001, to 885 million in 2006–06 and to 852 million in 2007–09. The financial crisis, economic downturn, persistent food price volatility, drought and other repercussions of climate change since 2006–08 may have prevented any further significant improvements in the number of people who are undernourished in developing countries since then. Africa has by far the highest prevalence, at around 23 percent in 2010–12 but though it is down from what it was in 1990–92 (27 percent) the numbers have risen from 175 million to 239 million with nearly 20 million added in the past four years. In subSaharan Africa, the modest progress achieved in recent years up to 2007 was reversed, with hunger rising 2 percent per year since then. In Asia, both prevalence and numbers dropped over the same period from 24 percent (739 million) to 14 percent (563 million). Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) boasts the lowest rate of undernourishment (8 percent) among developing country regions but the rate of progress has slowed recently. Countries considered as leastdeveloped countries and lowincome economies have the highest prevalence rates of all around 30 percent but down from the 40 percent levels of twenty years ago.

Interview ラン・ラン

Electronic communities of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) that engage in agile business-network collaborations, are enabled by recent blockchain-technology related innovations using smart contracting. DAOs utilize service-oriented cloud computing in a loosely-coupled collaboration lifecycle that commences with the setup phase. The latter supports the selection of services provided and used by DAOs in combination with smart contract negotiations. Such setup phases for DAO-communities use blueprints of business-network models that DAOs populate with tentative service offers. The negotiation phase may result either in a consensual agreement, a counteroffer, or a disagreement. In the latter case, the smart contract negotiation collapses and the lifecycle returns to the beginning of the selected collaboration blueprints. To the best of our knowledge, such a smart-contracting setup lifecycle has not been formalized so far. The paper fills the gap and evaluates the model with means of model-checking methods.

Creation of Smart-Contracting Collaborations for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

For improving the efficiency and effectiveness of business collaboration, the need emerges to inter-organizationally match e-business services. Recent research activities show heightened attention into that direction with the ecosystems-emergence of service-oriented computing clouds. As this increases the business-, conceptual-, and technical governance complexity, a need exists for using a reference architecture to evaluate and design standard-, and concrete architectures for business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. In this paper, we fill that gap by presenting the eSourcing Reference Architecture eSRA that emerges from B2B-research projects and we check this with a scenario-based validation method. We demonstrate how eSRA enables a quick evaluation of not only research-based B2B-architectures but also of industry application suits. That way, we show the usability and applicability in that with the help of eSRA, system designers directly establish a comprehensive understanding of fundamental B2B concepts and develop higher-quality domain-specific architectures.

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A reference architecture for managing dynamic inter-organizational business processes

This keynote paper addresses existing problems with traditional non-machine readable contracts that are based on trust. Such contracts have mostly a ceremonial purpose between transacting business parties and when conflicts occur, traditional contracts are often not enforcible. On the other hand, so called smart contracts that are machine readable and supported by blockchain-technology transactionalities, do not require qualitative trust between contracting parties as blockchain establish instead a quantitative notion of trust. However, currently existing smart-contract solutions that equip the protocol layer on top of blockchains with Turing-complete programming languages, lead to the false claim by industry practitioners they can manage smart contracts successfully. Instead, it is important to start considering the currently missing application layer for smart contracts.

Designing a Smart-Contract Application Layer for Transacting Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Meaningfully automating sociotechnical business collaboration promises efficiency-, effectiveness-, and quality increases for realizing next-generation decentralized autonomous organizations. For automating business-process aware cross-organizational operations, the development of existing choreography languages is technology driven and focuses less on sociotechnical suitability and expressiveness concepts and properties that recognize the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. This gap our suitability- and expressiveness exploration fills by means of a cross-organizational collaboration ontology that we map as a proof-of-concept evaluation to the eSourcing Markup Language (eSML). The latter we test in a feasibility case study to meaningfully support the automation of business collaboration. The developed eSourcing ontology and eSML is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.

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eContractual choreography-language properties towards cross-organizational business collaboration

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are confronted with the problem of spending a considerable time and effort on coordinating suppliers across multiple tiers of their supply chains. By supporting inter-organizational business-process collaborations with service-oriented technology, a scope for more efficient and effective supply-chain coordination is anticipated. This paper defines a formal framework, called eSourcing, for specifying structurally harmonized inter-organizational business-process collaborations. The framework permits verification of harmonized processes before their enactment. Moreover, the framework uses private and public layers to protect competitive knowledge of the individual partners. In the research project CrossWork, the eSourcing framework has been integral for harmonizing on an external level the intra-organizational business processes of a service-consuming and one or many service-providing organizations.

Alex Norta

Papers

Creation of Smart-Contracting Collaborations for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

A reference architecture for managing dynamic inter-organizational business processes

Designing a Smart-Contract Application Layer for Transacting Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

eContractual choreography-language properties towards cross-organizational business collaboration

Specification and verification of harmonized business-process collaborations