Artifact-Centric Modeling and Implementation of Blockchain-Enabled Business Processes

Abstract

Smart contracts can be used to support the execution of cross-organizational business processes involving mutually distrusting participants. Model-driven engineering is often used to generate such contracts and requires an appropriate blockchain-enabled process modeling language. Although artifact-centric languages are recommended in this context to support the business objects, lifecycles and cross-organizational process dimensions, most approaches rely on activity-centric languages such as BPMN. The few artifact-centric ones lack integrated support for one or more of these dimensions. To address this issue, in this paper we apply the design science research methodology. The authors propose a set of requirements for artifact-centric and blockchain-enabled business process modeling languages. It is used to evaluate existing work and present the design and demonstration of the B-MERODE language as an improved solution. The models created with the language can be formally verified and used as input to automatically generate smart contracts supporting the required process dimensions.