Blockchain Studio: A Role-Based Business Workflows Management System

The Blockchain technology is currently considered as a major paradigm shift in software architectures and applications. Indeed, it enables the automation of business worflows, using smart contracts, and hence the collaboration between trustless entities, without having to rely on any centralized or third parties. In this context, the automated generation of smart contracts, from high level business process models, has recently received increased interests within the research community. In this paper, we introduce the Blockchain Studio framework, which is a fork of Caterpillar, and whose objective is to enable the generation and automation of role-based business workflows on Ethereum based blockchains. The architecture and implementation of Blockchain Studio are firstly discussed, followed by the analysis of the achieved benefits on a practical use case related to the management of vehicles' life-cycles and data history. Various research challenges and opportunities are then highlighted.