BPMN to Smart Contract by Business Analyst

TL;DR

This paper presents TABS, a methodology and tool enabling Business Analysts to automatically generate smart contracts from BPMN and DMN models, simplifying blockchain application development without software developer involvement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining BPMN and DMN models to automate smart contract generation, supporting nested transactions and upgrades, with a proof-of-concept tool called TABS.

Findings

Successfully automates smart contract creation from BPMN/DMN models.

Supports nested transactions and contract upgrades.

Enables Business Analysts to generate smart contracts independently.

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of creating smart contracts for applications represented using Business Process Management and Notation (BPMN) models. In our prior work we presented a methodology that automates the generation of smart contracts from BPMN models. This approach abstracts the BPMN flow control, making it independent of the underlying blockchain infrastructure, with only the BPMN task elements requiring coding. In subsequent research, we enhanced our approach by adding support for nested transactions and enabling a smart contract repair and/or upgrade. To empower Business Analysts (BAs) to generate smart contracts without relying on software developers, we tackled the challenge of generating smart contracts from BPMN models without assistance of a software developer. We exploit the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard to represent the decisions and the business logic of the BPMN task elements and amended our methodology for transformation of BPMN models into smart contracts to support also the generation script to represent the business logic represented by the DMN models. To support such transformation, we describe how the BA documents, using the BPMN elements, the flow of information along with the flow of execution. Thus, if the BA is successful in representing the blockchain application requirements using BPMN and DMN models, our methodology and the tool, called TABS, that we developed as a proof of concept, is used to generate the smart contracts directly from those models without developer assistance.