Optimized Execution of Business Processes on Blockchain

García‐Bañuelos, Luciano; Пономарев, А. И.; Dumas, Marlon; Weber, Ingo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-65000-5_8

Cited by 125 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 9 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…The same approach was taken in our previous work. 7 As expected, all nonconforming behaviors were properly handled by Caterpillar: the request corresponding to a nonconforming event was ignored by Caterpillar because the underlying task was not enabled (lifecycle state: "executing").…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…In other words, this approach does not satisfy design principle # 4 in Section 4.1; the smart contracts generated from the process model rely on other off-chain runtime components. This approach used is proposed by García-Bañuelos et al 7 The third baseline, namely Optimized, is the same as Default with some code optimizations to reduce the number of bits required to store the state of process instances, as outlined by García-Bañuelos et al 7 The experiments were run on a personal computer with an Intel i5-5200 dual-core CPU. Moreover, we run them over testrpc, ‡ ‡ ‡ which is a NodeJS-based implementation of Ethereum client used for development purposes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lorikeet is an MDE tool that implements the approach of Weber et al and the translation algorithm from Garcia et al The process components are supplemented with asset registries (eg, tokens representing coins or titles). Lorikeet has been successfully applied in a number of projects with industry, demonstrating the value of process‐oriented smart contract generation.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The traversal is implemented as a while loop (lines [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. At each iteration, one contract address is processed.…”

Section: Querying Process State and Executing Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Caterpillar: A business process execution engine on the Ethereum blockchain

et al. 2019

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Summary Blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, allow a set of actors to maintain a ledger of transactions without relying on a central authority and to deploy programs, called smart contracts, that are executed whenever certain transactions occur. These features can be used as basic building blocks for executing collaborative business processes between mutually untrusting parties. However, implementing business processes using the low‐level primitives provided by blockchain platforms is cumbersome and error‐prone. In contrast, established business process management systems (BPMSs), such as those based on the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), provide convenient abstractions for rapid development of process‐oriented applications. This article demonstrates how to combine the advantages of a BPMS with those of a blockchain platform. The article introduces a blockchain‐based BPMN execution engine, named Caterpillar. Like any BPMN execution engine, Caterpillar supports the creation of instances of a process model and allows users to monitor the state of process instances and to execute tasks thereof. The specificity of Caterpillar is that the state of each process instance is maintained on the (Ethereum) blockchain and the workflow routing is performed by smart contracts generated by a BPMN‐to‐Solidity compiler. The Caterpillar compiler supports a large array of BPMN constructs, including subprocesses, multiple‐instance activities, and event handlers. The paper describes the architecture of Caterpillar and the interfaces it provides to support the monitoring of process instances, the allocation and execution of work items, and the execution of service tasks.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 57%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The traversal is implemented as a while loop (lines [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. At each iteration, one contract address is processed.…”

Section: Querying Process State and Executing Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Caterpillar: A business process execution engine on the Ethereum blockchain

et al. 2019

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“…Existing approaches to blockchain-based business process execution compile high-level process models into smart contracts that are deployed and executed on a blockchain platform. For example, [2], [7]- [10] take as input process models specified in BPMN while [11] compiles models specified in a declarative process modeling language. These approaches, however, suffer from two limitations.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interpreted Execution of Business Process Models on Blockchain

López‐Pintado

Dumas

García‐Bañuelos

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 23rd International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC)

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Blockchain technology provides a tamper-proof mechanism to execute inter-organizational business processes involving mutually untrusted parties. Existing approaches to blockchain-based process execution are based on code generation. In these approaches, a process model is compiled into one or more smart contracts, which are then deployed on a blockchain platform. Given the immutability of the deployed smart contracts, these compiled approaches ensure that all process instances conform to the process model. However, this advantage comes at the price of inflexibility. Any changes to the process model require the redeployment of the smart contracts (a costly operation). In addition, changes cannot be applied to running process instances. To address this lack of flexibility, this paper presents an interpreter of BPMN process models based on dynamic data structures. The proposed interpreter is embedded in a business process execution system with a modular multi-layered architecture, supporting the creation, execution, monitoring and dynamic update of process instances. For efficiency purposes, the interpreter relies on compact bitmap-based encodings of process models. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed interpreted approach achieves comparable or lower costs relative to existing compiled approaches.Index Terms-Blockchain, Model-Driven Engineering, Business Process Management System, Flexible Process Execution Activity [0] Task [3] Sub-Process [5] Call-Activity [4] Multi-Instance Parallel [6] Multi-Instance Sequential [7] Default [10] User [11] Script [12] Service [13] Receive [14] Expanded [11] Collapsed [12] Event-SubProcess [13] Gateway [1] Join / Split [3] Exclusive (XOR) [4] 1 function executeElements(iDataAddr, eInd) public2 if (msg.sender != (iDataAddr or this)) 3 throw 'REJECTED' 4 iFlowAddr = IData(iDataAddr).getIFlowNode(); 5 pState = IData(iDataAddr).getSubProcessState(); 6 queue = new Queue(eInd); 7 while(!queue.isEmpty()) 8 eInd = queue.pop(); 9 (preC, postC, typeInfo) = IFlow(iFlowAddr).find(eInd); 10 if (!isEnabled(preC, typeInfo, pState)) 11 continue; 12 removeTokens(pState, preC); 13 switch (typeInfo) 14 case PARALLEL_MULTI_INST: 15 for(i = 1 to IFlow(iFlowAddr).getCountInst(eInd)) 16 this.createInst(eInd, iDataAddr);

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