Business Process Assignment: Lorikeet for Blockchain-Based Business Function Execution
Question
Task: To prepare this business process assignment, each individual student is required to select one peer reviewed journal article on process analytics and change related to the course. Each individual student is required to write a report critically analyzing their selected journal article, including an introduction, summary, analysis and conclusion. The review should be supported by references from the literature, demonstrating wider reading and critical thinking.
Answer
Introduction
Model-driven engineering is a methodology considered to utilize models at several abstraction levels and various purposes at the time of software development. The researchers have discussed about the model-driven engineering approach in this paper. Blockchain is attracting too many interests from enterprises, governments, and start-ups. The possibility of utilizing blockchain sparks interest. The main aim of this paperis to discuss about the significance of Lorikeet that is well-known as a model-driven engineering tool used for Asset Management and Business process. The objective of the researchers is to analyze and evaluate the efficiency and operations of Lorikeet and how it works for business process and models. The paper help readers in acquiring a profound knowledge about the business processes and asset management based on blockchain. It also helps in gathering information regarding MDE and its operations. MDE can be leveraged for facilitating blockchain application development. Lorikeet is capable of producing smart contracts from BPM automatically.
Critical analysis report of:
Lorikeet: A Model-Driven Engineering Tool for Blockchain-Based Business Process Execution and Asset Management
Summary
The researchers have summarized about the modeling methods used for specifying models for integrating asset management and business processes. These all include the non-fungible as well as fungible asset registration, asset swap, and escrow for some conditional swap. Some templates have been provided to developers for customizing data schemes in the case of non-fungible as well as fungible asset registries. The OMG standard BPMN or Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 is extended for specifying the interactions among the non-fungible or fungible asset registries and business processes asset registries. Some specific smart contract generation methods are being considered for transforming models to smart contract programming language automatically. Solidity is taken into consideration for blockchain platforms(Lu et al., 2021). The interaction methods of Blockchain help in managing compilation as well as operation of smart contracts. It also helps in maintaining communication among deployed smart contracts.
The architecture of Lorikeet has been illustrated over here. The BPMN 2.0 has been extended for supporting representation as well as interactions with the registries in BPMN process model. Some options are being provided for taking actions for individual registry. Some backend components are constructed for microservice-based architecture. On the other hand, users become capable of deploying smart contracts on blockchain. Lorikeet is considered to be well-evaluated tool which is utilized to create blockchain smart contracts and modeling a grain title transfer process (Milani et al., 2021).
Blockchain is known as advanced distributed ledger technology. It helps to enable contracts on transactional and decentralized data sharing among a huge network. Various organizations are now discovering the leverage of Blockchain technology for building trust which will be helpful for next generations for applications purposes. In those areas, Blockchain applied are diverse. It includes digital and physical asset tokens, registry, business procedures, and identity management. Management of assets has been evaluated as the main application of the Blockchain(Tran et al., 2018). It begins with the help of fungible assets such as tokens, cryptocurrency, and many more. Non-fungible assets are considered by other contract technology. It will be causing trusting issues, counterparty risks, and inefficiencies.
Building systems on Blockchain is happened because of the learning curve of the technology. Model-driven engineering is automatically creating some software system code with the help of other models. Model-driven engineering tools have been generating some code that is tested well on various practices. It also helps developers for managing the complexity of the software by concentrating on building other models. They don't need any expert development knowledge. I this article, the implementation of the leverage Model is driven engineering have been shown which helps in the development of all applications regarding Blockchain in other asset registers and business procedures. By designing and implementing the Model-driven engineering tool which is named Lorikeet, it helps to produce smart contracts automatically from various business procedure models and other registry data schema(Lu et al., 2018). It incorporates and implements BPMN translation algorithms. It is different from a caterpillar. It helps to tackle difficulties by integrating all asset management and other business procedural interactions.
Analysis
The main architecture of Lorikeet has been illustrated here which consists of a spate modeler user interface. It contains a Registry generator, BPMN translator, and Blockchain trigger also. The modeler user interface component is generated by a web application that helps to build various registry models and business procedures for users. The BPMN is used to support the representation and interaction of all registers in-process model. The new extension is made up of two elements named Action Invocation and Registry Reference. It also contains some moderate XML attributes and graphical notations. The Registry Reference also represents the asset data which helps to store on the Blockchain. On the other hand, Active Invocation will show the registry of data assets on the Blockchain.
The registry modeler consists of four parts. They are Registry type, basic information like description, registry name, data fields, and their types also. Others are basic operations like create, read, update, delete and registry type like distributed or single. An access control policy has been proposed to enforce on the records of registry like management actions such as Crete, delete, update and transfer_ownership. An option has been provided here for allowing all separate registries of records which can be managed by the instance of processes. From all processes, the action helps to register, to change all registry records. The registry generator will be taking data structure details and helps to execute the main process model (De Sousa et al., 2020). Advance and registry operations are helping to generate the smart contract of the registry. The triggered communication with the Blockchain node is used to handle all compilation ad deployment. They also used to interact with other solidity contracts.
Lorikeet is a modern evaluated tool that is used to create
Blockchain contracts in academia and industry. Lorikeet also collaborates with academic student projects. A huge amount of external Blockchain applications are using this tool Lorikeet. They all receive positive feedback from their clients. It is used for demo purposes. It also uses to model some transfer procedures use cases. It helps to generate some smart contract code that is based on various models. This use case is encountered in the project(Xuet al., 2019). A lot of discussions introduced me to the industry. It is based on all information which is available publically. It is found that the registry modeler UI and BPMN are interacting with back-end microservices through API gateway that is forwarding all API calls to corresponding micro-service. This process is a bit complicated. Also, a point to be considered is the existence of one grain registry that interacts with the process of selected grain title transfer.
Conclusion
Some specific application classes are utilizing blockchain for managing business processes throughout the organization and digital asset management that are controlled and maintained on-chain. Assets can be categorized into non-fungible and fungible assets. Non-fungible assets are representing unique assets whereas fungible assets are some interchangeable individual units. Both the nonfungible and fungible assets can be handled by a centralized trusted authority traditionally. This can lead to trust issues and may introduce some inefficiency. It gets difficult for developers in developing blockchain applications for asset management and business processes, without having any introduction to bugs or vulnerabilities. MDE or Model-driven engineering helps in reducing the risks as they combine some code snippets according to model specification. It becomes much easier to understand as compared to the source code. Model-driven engineering is used to implement other business procedures which help to manage all assets. The tool Lorikeet has automatically generated a well-tested contract code from all other specifications which are encoded for data registry and business procedures. It is based on the newly implemented transformation model. The tool will be demonstrated by using a separate use case.
References
Di Ciccio, C., Cecconi, A., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., López-Pintado, O., Lu, Q., Mendling, J., Ponomarev, A., Tran, A.B. and Weber, I., 2019.Blockchain support for collaborative business processes. InformatikSpektrum, 42(3), pp.182-190.
Lu, Q., Binh Tran, A., Weber, I., O'Connor, H., Rimba, P., Xu, X., Staples, M., Zhu, L. and Jeffery, R., 2021.Integrated model?driven engineering of blockchain applications for business processes and asset management. Software: Practice and Experience, 51(5), pp.1059-1079.
Lu, Q., Weber, I. and Staples, M., 2018. Why model-driven engineering fits the needs for blockchain application development. IEEE Blockchain Technical Briefs.
Xu, X., Weber, I. and Staples, M., 2019.Model-driven engineering for blockchain applications.In Architecture for Blockchain Applications (pp. 149-172).Springer, Cham.
Milani, F., Garcia-Banuelos, L., Filipova, S. and Markovska, M., 2021. Modellingblockchain-based business processes: a comparative analysis of BPMN vs CMMN. Business Process Management Journal.
Tran, A.B., Lu, Q. and Weber, I., 2018, September. Lorikeet: A Model-Driven Engineering Tool for Blockchain-Based Business Process Execution and Asset Management. In BPM (Dissertation/Demos/Industry) (pp. 56-60).
De Sousa, V.A. and Corentin, B., 2019, May. Towards an integrated methodology for the development of blockchain-based solutions supporting cross-organizational processes. In 2019 13th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Dittmann, G., Sorniotti, A. and Völzer, H., 2019, October.Model-Driven Engineering for Multi-party Interactions on a Blockchain–An Example.In International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (pp. 181-194).Springer, Cham.
De Sousa, V.A., Burnay, C. and Snoeck, M., 2020, June. B-MERODE: A Model-Driven Engineering and Artifact-Centric Approach to Generate Blockchain-Based Information Systems. In International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (pp. 117-133).Springer, Cham.
