Nicolas Herbaut

Nicolas Herbaut

Associate Professor in Computer Science, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Blockchain for Data Management, Privacy, Architecture and Process management of the Information Systems

The proposal is a new field of research at the CRI which is articulated and is greatly enriched by previous work carried out in the team on the engineering of requirements and product lines, process modeling and the architecture of enterprise applications.

As more and more companies are launching blockchain projects, deciding between this type of solution and a more traditional service-based architecture remains extremely difficult, particularly for complex business processes involving several stakeholders (suppliers, customers, technology partners).

Initially through the thesis of Nicolas Six (2019-2022) and that of Claudia Negri (2019-2022), we worked on the constitution of a knowledge base and a multi-criteria selection algorithm allowing the through questions based on user requirements, to recommend the most suitable blockchain solution. In a second phase, we were interested in the design of blockchain-based solutions by writing a systematic study of the literature with the aim of obtaining a classification of the architectural patterns. We are working on two complementary aspects to allow the generation of code and infrastructure corresponding to the requirements (1) by further formalizing the blockchain patterns in the form of an ontology, allowing us to bring out the different relationships between patterns and discovering which ones are most used and (2) proposing a blockchain product line solution where the reasoning made on the ontology will allow us a configuration assisted by the requirements of the feature model.

We are working in parallel through Eddy Kiomba’s thesis (2021-2024), on the issues of trust within inter-organizational relations, with the objective of qualifying and modeling trust in inter-organizational relations and proposing solutions. Adaptive potentially using blockchain.

We also proposed a solution based on blockchain and Trusted Execution Environments for trustless data exchange, as part of an on-demand artificial intelligence platform.

  1. Nicolas Six, Nicolas Herbaut, Camille Salinesi, “Blockchain software patterns for the design of decentralized applications: A systematic literature review.” Blockchain: Research and Applications, 2022.
  2. Nicolas Six, Andrea Perrichon-Chr{'e}tien, Nicolas Herbaut, “SAIaaS: A Blockchain-based solution for secure artificial intelligence as-a-Service.” In the proceedings of The International Conference on Deep Learning, Big Data and Blockchain, 2021.
  3. Nicolas Six, Nicolas Herbaut, Camille Salinesi, “Harmonica: A Framework for Semi-automated Design and Implementation of Blockchain Applications.” INSIGHT, 2021.
  4. Nicolas Six, Nicolas Herbaut, Camille Salinesi, “Which Blockchain to choose? A decision support tool to guide the choice of a Blockchain technology.” In the proceedings of INFORSID, 2020.
  5. Nicolas Six, Claudia Ribalta, Nicolas Herbaut, Camille Salinesi, “A blockchain-based pattern for confidential and pseudo-anonymous contract enforcement.” In the proceedings of 2020 IEEE 19th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), 2020.
  6. Boubakr Nour, Adlen Ksentini, Nicolas Herbaut, Pantelis Frangoudis, Hassine Moungla, “A blockchain-based network slice broker for 5G services.” IEEE Networking Letters, 2019.

Projects

Blade

Assisted decision on blockchain solution selection, based on requirements collection.

OntoTools

Assisted decision on blockchain pattern selection, based on interactive questioning.