Early Design Mechanism for Upgrading Smart Contract Business Processes

Smart Contracts-based business processes (SC BP) are gaining popularity because of several compelling reasons such as Cross-Industry Applicability, Environmental Sustainability, Security, etc. The upgradability of an SC BP is an important aspect of blockchain-based systems to accommodate evolving business requirements, fix issues, and improve the efficiency of SC BPs over time. Upgrading SC BP is very challenging because SCs on many blockchain platforms are designed to be immutable. To address this critical issue, an early Fault Tolerance (FT)-based SC upgrade design mechanism has been presented in this paper. The mechanism consists of three stages namely: Business Process (BP) modeling, Deriving SC BP, and Upgrading SC BP. The BP modeling stage generates a BP model following web service (WS) and its composition modeling. In the Second stage, an SC BP is generated by the business logic mapping, developing SC logic, and finally coding a smart contract that defines the behavior according to the formulated rules of the contract when it’s executed on a blockchain. Lastly, an FT-based approach has been proposed to update the SC BP while ensuring maximum availability during the upgrade. The proposed three-stage upgrade design mechanism addresses the problem of the upgradability issue of SC BP by specifying a robust upgrade management procedure at an early SC design level that will ensure a non-disruptive, less risky, reliable continuous upgrade process.