Empowering Business-Level Blockchain Users with a Rules Framework for Smart Contracts

• Published in: Service-Oriented Computing Vol. 11236; pp. 111 - 128
• Main Authors: Astigarraga, Tara, Chen, Xiaoyan, Chen, Yaoliang, Gu, Jingxiao, Hull, Richard, Jiao, Limei, Li, Yuliang, Novotny, Petr
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• ISBN: 9783030035952; 3030035956
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_8

The importance and adoption of Blockchain to support secure and trusted collaborations between businesses continues to grow. In today’s practice, most Blockchain smart contracts (which capture the business processing logic) are written primarily by software developers. To enable widespread adoption of Blockchain, business analysts and subject matter experts will need to have direct access to the smart contract logic, including the abilities to understand, modify, and create substantial portions of that logic. This paper describes a fully functioning framework and system for specifying and executing smart contracts in which the core logic is specified by a controlled English, business-level rules language. The framework includes a browser-based smart editor for rules; a parser generator that enables substantial variation in the rules syntax; code generation that maps to a RETE based rules engine; and execution of the rules in either on-chain (using Hyperledger Fabric) or off-chain modes. The paper describes the rules framework and possible extensions, and identifies key aspects of Blockchain that impact the implementation.