Concept of HAOpsSC: Toward Decentralized Operations for Ensuring High Availability in Consortium Blockchain-based Systems

A consortium blockchain-based system is typically built across multiple organizations. In such systems, system operations across multiple organizations in a decentralized manner are essential to maintain the value of introducing blockchains. To achieve efficient decentralized operations for consortium blockchain-based systems, a decentralized inter-organizational operations method called Operations Smart Contract (OpsSC), which defines an operational workflow as a smart contract, was proposed. While the conventional OpsSC prioritizes consistent execution across organizations, there is an unresolved issue that the availability of the entire consortium could be compromised in some scenarios. To address this issue, this paper presents an initial concept and basic framework of a new decentralized operations method named HAOpsSC. This method extends the conventional OpsSC by aggregating the operational status of the entire consortium and automatically controlling the operations execution so that the status does not exceed the availability tolerance range of the consortium, thereby achieving both high availability and operational efficiency.