Running transactional business processes with blockchain's smart contracts

Amina Brahem (1, 2) , Nizar Messai (1) , Yacine Sam (1) , Sami Bhiri (2) , Thomas Devogele (1) , Walid Gaaloul (3, 4, 5)

1 BDTLN - Bases de données et traitement des langues naturelles
2 OASIS - Optimisation des systèmes industriels et de services [Tunis]
3 TSP - INF - Département Informatique
4 IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris
5 ACMES-SAMOVAR - Architecture, Cloud continuum, formal Models, artificial intElligence and Services in distributed computing

Smart Contracts (SC for short) are gaining momentum as a suitable technology for ensuring trusted execution of Business Processes (BP for short) in open environment. Nevertheless, the transactional semantics of SC which follow ACID transactions are not appropriate for BP characteristics. Indeed, it is admitted that ACID transactions are limited to cope with complex control structure and long running execution of BP. Transactional Business Processes (TBP for short) have emerged as an extension to ACID models to overcome these limits. A TBP ensures transactional reliability of advanced transactions having a control structure as complex as for BP. In this paper, we propose an approach that builds on SC and extends them to implement TBP. We extend Caterpillar, an existing BP execution engine developed on top of Ethereum, to implement our approach and support the execution of TBP.

Mots clés: Business processes; Transactional business processes; Open and untrusted environment; Blockchain; Smart contracts

Domaines: Autre [cs.OH]

Amina Brahem, Nizar Messai, Yacine Sam, Sami Bhiri, Thomas Devogele, et al.. Running transactional business processes with blockchain's smart contracts. ICWS 2020: IEEE International Conference on Web Services, Oct 2020, Beijing (online), China. pp.89-93, ⟨10.1109/ICWS49710.2020.00019⟩. ⟨hal-03046990⟩