Business Process Engineering for Data Storing and Processing in a Collaborative Distributed Environment Based on Provenance Metadata, Smart Contracts and Blockchain Technology

We suggest a novel approach to designing totally decentralized data management systems in distributed environments with administratively unrelated or loosely related user groups and in conditions of partial or complete lack of trust between them. This approach is based on the integration of blockchain technology, smart contracts and provenance metadata driven data management. Provenance metadata (PMD) contain key information that is necessary to determine the origin, authorship and quality of relevant data, their storage and usage consistency, and for interpretation and confirmation of relevant results of data processing. Architecture, operation principles and algorithms have been developed for the system, entitled ProvHL (Provenance HyperLedger), which provides fault-tolerant, safe and reliable management of provenance metadata, control of operations with data files, as well as resource access management in collaborative distributed computing systems (CDCS). CDCS refers to distributed systems formed by combining into a single pool of computer resources of various organizations (institutions) to work together in the framework of a project. The paper also suggests a new blockchain-based method for delegation of rights within distributed computing systems which is free from shortcomings inherent in other solutions. The main goal of the work is to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach and the above technologies to improve the functional properties of CDCSs.