Modeling Incomplete Procedural Contracts with Blockchain-based Enforceable Business Processes

In the socio-economic landscape, we can recognize an emerging form of organization: the network coalition. A network coalition is a form of concerted cooperation in which a group of agents decides to collaborate to achieve a common goal. The decentralized and cooperative nature of a network coalition presents new challenges in automating its processes, which cannot be treated as traditional business processes managed by a centralized information system. In the literature, the notion of Exogenous Business Process (XBP) has been introduced to capture such processes. An XBP specification is intended as a potentially incomplete, renegotiable, procedural contract to which different parties adhere in order to achieve a predefined business goal. The concept of Enforceable Business Process (EBP) has been proposed as a possible abstraction for modeling and automating the XBPs of a network coalition. An EBP is essentially an evolution of the original concept of smart contract, which is able to properly manage contractual incompleteness while providing automatic enforceability. The aim of this paper is to formalize the notion of EBP and discuss how contractual incompleteness can be handled by a Decentralized Autonomous Information System (DAIS). The complete formalization of both procedural and incompleteness aspects of EBPs, as provided by this paper, lays the basis for the construction of the next generation of DAIS, as well as the diffusion of network coalition into many application domains, such as supply chains, business alliances, joint ventures, and others.