At the 23rd International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) in Seville, Ingo Weber, with Xiwei Xu, Régis Riveret, Guido Governatori, Alexander Ponomarev, and Jan Mendling, received the BPM Test-of-Time Award 2025. In their widely cited paper „Untrusted Business Process Monitoring and Execution Using Blockchain”, the authors address the fundamental problem of trust in collaborative business process execution—for example, in supply chains involving multiple participants.
Blockchain: New Technology for Executing Collaborative Business Processes
While traditional approaches require agreement on a single trusted party to control and monitor shared business processes, the article introduced a groundbreaking solution in 2016: the use of blockchain. It is a technology for decentralized and transactional data exchange that is shared across many computers but not controlled by any single party. This makes it nearly impossible to tamper with recorded information. Additionally, special programs can be executed on the blockchain in a tamper-proof manner - in the case of the article, to implement specific parts of a process. Blockchain thus enables organizations to collaborate without having to trust a single party.
Since its publication, the paper has sparked a new research direction at the intersection of business process management and blockchain technology, which has since developed into a prominent research area. As the first comprehensive approach to executing collaborative business processes on blockchain, the work helped establish the technical foundation for decentralized business process management. This enables organizations to collaborate efficiently without sacrificing autonomy or requiring centralized control.
Correlation-Based Monitoring System for Secure Cloud Operations
In addition, Ingo Weber, together with Mostafa Farshchi, Jean-Guy Schneider, and John Grundy, received the IEEE ISSRE 2025 Test-of-Time Award for their work „Anomaly Detection of Cloud Application Operations Using Log and Cloud Metric Correlation Analysis“. In their paper published at the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2015, the authors present a solution for detecting anomalies in application operations within cloud environments. The failure of these operations, such as software upgrades, backups or redeployments, is one of the main causes of system-wide outages. Although modern cloud systems generate an overwhelming amount of monitoring information every minute, fault detection remains difficult because the two most important data sources were usually examined separately:
- Logs provide information about what actions occurred.
- Metrics provide information about how the system performed.
If an error occurs during an operation, it was extremely difficult to connect these separate streams of information in real-time. Using a regression-based analysis technique, Weber and his colleagues have developed an automated monitoring system that finds the correlation between logs and metrics, thereby learning the relationships between operational activities and their expected effects on cloud resources.
Their paper demonstrated that effective monitoring requires not only collecting but also correlating information in order to catch operational failures in real-time. This approach is now standard practice in cloud operations. Back in 2015, the paper received the ISSRE Best Paper Award for its early contribution to the perception of monitoring complex systems. The method has since become central to modern monitoring practices.