This book integrates the material of the lecture series "Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation", offered at Kiel University. The lecture series sheds light on current research topics on blockchain and robotic process automation (RPA) also in combination with business process management (BPM) or process mining. In this series, leading scientists and business experts give insights into the use of the blockchain technology and RPA. The seven contributions included offer a general introduction into blockchain and smart contracts, and detail the extraction of meaningful events for process mining from blockchain, challenges of blockchain-based collaborative business processes, executing Decision Model and Notation decisions on the blockchain, a blockchain-based solution for digital payment, blockchain use cases in transportation and logistics, and automatically identifying process automation candidates using natural language processing. Overall, the book provides researchers and graduate students with a basic introduction into blockchain, its applications, useful combinations of BPM and blockchain, and use cases for RPA.

Agnes Koschmider is Professor of Information Systems and head of the Process Analytics group at Kiel University, Germany. Agnes has published numerous papers in various high-ranked conferences and journals and she is a lecturer of the course "Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation" at Kiel University. Her work was awarded with the Wolfgang-Heilmann-Prize, a junior fellowship of the German Informatics Society and a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Pretoria. Stefan Schulte is Associate Professor at TU Wien, Austria. Stefan has published more than 100 papers in the field of distributed systems, with a particular focus on data engineering, the Internet of Things, and blockchains. He heads the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Blockchain Technologies for the Internet of Things.