Transforming Automatically BPMN Models to Smart Contracts with Nested Collaborative Transactions (TABS+)

TL;DR

This paper extends an automated method to transform BPMN models into smart contracts by supporting nested collaborative transactions, simplifying development and ensuring transactional properties in blockchain applications.

Contribution

It introduces TABS+ which automatically identifies and transforms BPMN collaborative transaction patterns into smart contracts with nested transaction support.

Findings

Supports nested collaborative transactions in smart contracts

Reduces developer effort by automating synchronization

Provides a proof-of-concept tool demonstrating feasibility

Abstract

Development of blockchain smart contracts is more difficult than mainstream software development because the underlying blockchain infrastructure poses additional complexity. To ease the developer's task of writing smart contract, as other research efforts, we also use Business Process Model and Notation BPMN modeling to describe application requirements for trade of goods and services and then transform automatically the BPMN model into the methods of a smart contract. In our previous research we described our approach and a tool to Transform Automatically BPMN models into Smart contracts TABS. In this paper, we describe how the TABS approach is augmented with the support for a BPMN collaborative transaction by several actors. Our approach analyzes the BPMN model to determine which patterns in the BPMN model are suitable for use as collaborative transactions. The found BPMN patterns that are suitable as transactions are shown to the developer who decides which ones should be deployed as collaborative transactions. We describe how our approach automatically transform the BPMN model into smart contract the provides a transaction mechanism to enforce the transactional properties of the nested transactions. Our approach greatly reduces the developers task as synchronization of collaborative activities is provided by our approach, so that the developer needs to code only independent tasks with well-defined inputs and outputs. We also overview the TABS+ tool we built as a proof of concept to show that our approach is feasible. Finally, we provide estimates on the cost of supporting the nested BPMN collaborative transactions.